Your GTM Foundations Are Probably Wrong | Vihaar Nandigala

The worst tools I've definitely tried have been those tools that just try to bundle everything and do everything at once.

You did one thing really well, but now you want to try to capture everyone's market share and instead of doing one thing well, you do 27 things shitty.

Generally for sales teams, there should just be one or I think two tools and every other tool you're trying to connect into those tools.

Welcome back to another episode of the Bridge the Gap podcast powered by none other than Revenue Reagan. Today's guest is Vihar Nandagala, who's the co-founder of Orange Slice. I love the name, by the way, a YC S25 startup that just raised $5.3 million to help sales teams find customers who already want to buy. Vihar's tested over a thousand sales tools, that's a lot of numbers, built and exited startups before graduating college, and is now building AI agents designed to cut through go-to-market noise and surface real buying intent. We're going to talk about signals versus noise, the future of prospecting, and what happens when the next generation of founders redesign sales from first principles. Vihar, thanks for joining the show.

No, thanks for having me, guys. I'm super stoked to talk about everything sales.

Awesome, Vihar. I really appreciate it. And right in the initial piece, like testing a thousand sales tools, I thought I test a lot of sales tools. I get Adam to test a lot of sales tools. What did that experience teach you about the current go-to-market landscape and the state of go-to-market?

Yeah, so I've tried every tool out there in the sun. And what it really taught me, the key lesson I learned is the bar for go-to-market sales tools is actually very high. A lot of them are actually a lot better than you think. Which is surprising. And I think that's also why we have so many tools because there's so many different functions of sales that need to be optimized.

And that was actually a big lesson. I don't think people actually realize just because there's a lot of tools, you'd assume a lot of them aren't very useful. But I always felt like each tool had their specific niche they did very well. And with those, the biggest problem is just juggling all those tools. And I'd say even before juggling them, just education. Knowing about what tools are good for what is one of the hardest parts I see other young founders and other people starting their sales orgs really struggle with. Like, I want to do this sort of niche sales activity, you know, what are the tools that are really great for this? And so just trying out all the tools lets you as a person understand, okay, enrichment tools are great for this. This is great for contact information. You can kind of orchestrate your own sales organization.

So I'm going to push back a little bit because I'm feeling a little spicy today. I worked with a company that had 37 sales tools for the reps to log into. No exaggeration. 37 sales tools. And I hear you on niche and I can certainly argue on the bar being high for go-to-market sales tools versus not. Maybe you've tried some better tools than we have. But I've tried some things that I'm like I don't even know how the 37 layers of approval allowed this to hit the product. But consolidation, like do you really as a founder want to have to log into a different tool for every different part of go-to-market that you want? Or does someone just need to get top of funnel right, middle of funnel right, bottom of funnel right?

Yeah, no I definitely agree with you that you have this tool exhaustion where you really shouldn't be logging into 27 different tools.

37, but yeah, 27.

Yeah, that's how big it is. I can't even imagine. Like, generally for sales teams, there should just be one or I think two tools and every other tool should kind of connect into those tools. And so when I think of more sales tooling, I actually think of it as sales infrastructure. Like, what are the actual infrastructure layers we set up our sales org with? And so when I talk about a lot of these tools, oftentimes they're just integrated into the standard CRM space or wherever the reps operate. So a lot of those tools actually, I think, bubble up or at least the ones that I try and find a lot of value from. I'm not the biggest fan of connecting and logging into a thousand different tools. I'm very big on the future of sales being super interconnected between tooling, but then obviously each vertical is just a different provider that you just set up one time and then you never log into again.

Yeah. And it'll be super interesting to see what ends up happening even in the realm of like a CRM for example. So I know you're taking on signals and data. But if we think about basics, the things that we use the most has been CRM from like the beginning of time from a sales perspective. But if we're honest with ourselves, it's just a big database. Like, do you put a UI that's really specific for your organization on top of a database like Supabase or, you know, SQL? Like you could do something super simple. Is that where it's going to end up going? Because these CRMs or these let's just call them go-to-market technologies are trying to be everything to everybody and then they're just creating noise.

Yeah, definitely. I agree. The worst tools I've definitely tried have been those tools that just try to bundle everything and do everything at once because oftentimes they're just doing everything suboptimally or I found out they're just wrapping another tool and I can do it cheaper with that other tool.

I mean, that's what happened with the various sales engagement platforms, right? Like they started with sequencing and then they moved to, well, I do this and this and then I do everything. Outreach and Salesloft are probably the two biggest examples we talk about these folks a lot. The two biggest examples. It's like you did one thing really well, but now you want to try to capture everyone's market share and instead of doing one thing well, you do 27 things shitty.

Yeah, no yeah. I think that's a similar thing on how we feel when we're testing new sales tools. So if they're really specific and niche and verticalized, usually they're very good at the actual test they want. All the generic platforms, I think they're great for beginners or maybe you know, solo entrepreneurs that need sort of bundled services and reduced friction. But for anything I think serious sales, it's always good to break down and figure out what infrastructure works best for each company.

And to talk to Dale's point as well on the CRM layer. I've thought about a lot the idea of, could you build a certain interface on your database as a sales org and make it super customized? And I think a great example of this, I don't know if you guys have seen, but Ramp actually created their own internal sales hub for their sales reps. Which was really cool because Ramp's a, I think, a $30 billion company now. And they're so big they realize, like, our method of selling is so unique and we want to optimize our sales reps for it. They created their own sequencers, intent signals, all of these things, and their own custom dashboard that sits on top of and connects to all their internal tooling like CRM, sequencers. And that's where a lot of their sales reps live in this custom-built sales terminal, which when they released that is super interesting. And I think it was like a point towards the direction of, okay, a lot of teams—because the cost of software is going down for UI and things like that—we can start to customize it really for our sales reps.

But I do think CRM and those database layers are so fundamentally important as infrastructure because there's things you can't do wrong and things you can't build really well. Those basic features, I think, they'll always be around there for a while. But I'm curious, Dale, will you tell you CRMs are going away or need to go away?

Well, so here's the thing. We've been working with a lot of clients and they're starting to experiment across, like, how do you put the data, right? And so we're building things. We're building prospect dossiers for clients. We're building things that are integrated into the process that you don't necessarily like you can't go out and buy, or you could buy a tool like the thousand tools that you tried, but it may be good at one thing but then it's got like eight other things. So you have like a Venn diagram of all the overlap that's happening.

And so as we're deploying or building the architecture with the clients on this, they start saying, "Well, we want to put it into HubSpot." And I'm like, "Okay, you don't need 85,000 fields in HubSpot and like storing all the contractual pieces because other people need to touch a contract. Like why are we putting things in places that other people need to touch, like operations or finance? And then you've got to get a CRM license?" Not CRM. Take CRM out of it. I actually think like the data stores...

Snowflake or some of these other big data store places will probably be better to store the data on, then have an integration layer than have a UI layer. Like, the UI layer is becoming such a commoditized piece.

I actually generally agree with that. For context, we use Supabase internally as our CRM, right? Because interesting as your CRM. Yeah, as our CRM. All of our deals are tracked in there, all of our customers are tracked in there. It's much more efficient because it's built as a database first, not as a CRM face first. And fundamentally, CRMs are just databases with that UI sprinkled on top for sales reps to manage. And we kind of just have agents like Claude Code interact with our Supabase instance and our CRM through Claude Code. As we've seen a lot of the go-to-market community adopting, we're sort of big believers in that vision. It's much more optimal, at least how we work.

We have a client that's using HubSpot. HubSpot's stock supports this conversation, by the way, if anyone's looked at it recently, but I digress. We have a client that's using Airtable to manage all their CSM stuff, which I don't recommend. Well, I don't recommend it if you don't have a UI on top of it, right? So you have people writing directly to the database with no control, which is another big problem that we're going to end up having.

So let's shift gears a little because we can certainly talk about CRM forever and we can make big enemies of our partners. Love you, HubSpot. You're wonderful. Let's just say tomorrow morning you get a mandate to look at tools out there and make 80% of them disappear. Which category, Vhar, do you think we would miss the least? Like, what do you think just has got to go?

Oh man, that's a good one. I actually wouldn't choose CRM for this because it's so core infrastructure for so many sales teams that operate through it. And a lot of the tools I think of, they just do that one thing really well that you kind of need, whether it be a sequencer, a lead nurturer, or just tracking deals, call recordings. Like the Gongs of the world are super important as well.

Are sequencers so important? Do we still need the Outreach, from the Sales Lofts of the world?

That's the one that in my mind I was like, okay, that's probably the least useful one because I do think sales is moving towards a direction where cold email is basically a version of paid marketing. And also, I think as AI catches up into the—because AI is caught up in the sequencer. So if you have people using AI to mass outbound people, I think as AI catches up to the inboxes of people, a lot of that stuff will just start getting screened out. I mean, listen, a certain company today who did they were a dialer first just launched their AI sequencer. So like, all we're doing is throwing more out there, right? Like I'm going to just AI sequence you. Why do we need people? Like, at the end of the day, I just need one machine to tell me who to reach out to, what to reach out to, when, what to say, and how to say it, and then you get your email, and it's still garbage.

Yeah, yeah. I think that's a big problem we've seen too. And we've seen a lot of sales transition back to like in-person events, conferences, ABM, sort of social. That's doing a lot better than these mass automated outbound sequencers. And even for us, that's also why at Orange Slice, like we don't have a sequencer because we don't want to push our users into just sending mass emails because it is the thing that we don't think is the future of sales. It's like go out, talk to those customers, show up in person, really resonate with them, listen, understand their problems, and I guarantee you if you provide value to them, things will work out.

Versus sending an email every three days at the same time every morning at 8:47 a.m. with the same exact copy to everyone else saying, "Hey, we did this for X company. Would you want to try?" No, I'm good. I don't really want to try just yet.

Right. All right, let's shift gears. So we're talking about tools. Orange Slice is a tool. What was that core insight or that epiphany or that aha moment that said, "I want to build Orange Slice"? And then separately, I want to know about the name.

Yeah, so for context, me and my co-founder, we met at the University of Michigan. I think we were very scrappy, entrepreneurial spirit throughout college, starting different businesses. And I ended up selling my last company. And the next thing we tried—he was the first person I pulled in to as my roommate in college. I said, "Hey, let's work on something together." The first thing we tried was actually in the go-to-market sales space because that was always the toughest thing for me as a founder with my previous company. I spent probably 80% of my time on go-to-market and sales.

So for context, we were selling to restaurants. We were building a lot of custom scrapers—scraping Google Maps, figuring out what restaurants we needed to target, scraping reviews and things like that. And so we tried to bring that expertise to other companies. So for a while, actually, just for a whole year, we were an agency of how do we help customers and our clients find perfect-fit customers. And so for us, through that learning phase, a lot of the tools we used—we used a lot of the major ones. Think of like the Apollos, even tried out DoomInfo, even tried out Play. And we always felt like there was no reason that our customers shouldn't be able to do this, and we needed to do this for them.

And so what we were trying to build is, I'd say, the tool we wanted when we were first starting as a GTM agency: it was like, okay, I just want an easy way to get my ideas and these really creative thoughts into actual sales workflows and implementations. And for us, it was constant iteration through these tools of like, okay, what do I need to connect? How do I set this thing up in Clay? And like, those are the pain points we were really feeling as a go-to-market agency. We really felt go-to-market, especially how competitive it is, should only be limited by like the ideas you create—like, "Oh, I want to do this go-to-market thing that's very unique." It shouldn't really be limited by how do I set these things up. And with AI sort of coming around the corner, it was kind of the perfect time for us of like, "Okay, let's start building our own platform." And we actually just used Orange Slice internally for servicing these clients as the only go-to-market tool we used. And then we have only just recently launched it to the public for other people to try out as well.

That's usually the way a lot of technologies get built out. It's something you really needed, you really wanted, and then you deployed it out. So why the name?

Oh, yes. Orange Slice. There's actually not too much of a rhyme or reason. The original story is I think we were on our couch in our living room in our dingy college apartment, and we were kind of looking at names and domains. And we recently just saw Lemon Squeezy, a company bought by Stripe. We're like, "Wow, you really can just name your company anything." So that kind of opened the door for us of being like, let's just be fun and creative. I think that's way more interesting than, you know, a Capital Partners LLC sort of name. And so we decided to go with Orange Slice because a lot of the vision we want to build is an operating system that's malleable and changeable for salespeople. So a play on words of OS, and we decided Orange Slice is a fun acronym instead.

I like that. The O is for OS.

What's the biggest—

Oh, orange is my favorite color. I think that's also why I pushed for my co-founder. I was like, "Hey, I love orange. It's my favorite color. It's super fun and exciting." And he actually was like, "This is a horrible marketing color. Bright orange. It's like, it doesn't fit with anything." But we decided still to stick with it.

Actually, there's a lot of companies that will go down that path. Like Consensus did a big orange push.

One of our clients is like orange and blue after the Broncos.

Oh, that's cool. That's interesting. Yeah. Um, what's the biggest misconception about intent data or AI prospecting that you've run across?

I think the biggest one I've seen is like personalization. Like, really, really matters or affects offers and targeting. And I think a lot of people get too stuck on how can I inject, you know, "Hey, I saw your dog in your last LinkedIn post. Here's my offer," and people fall down that rabbit hole, especially founders that aren't sales-oriented where—

It's really not the thing that's going to make the person buy the product. There's no magic combination of words you can say to force someone to buy something they don't want. So the most important layer is really just targeting. How can I figure out someone has this problem internally and we're the solution, and then provide them value? And deals feel so much easier that way. I think any buyer feels so much more at ease than getting cold calls at 5:00 AM in the middle of the night.

And as a person that also buys products, sometimes I have these problems. Sometimes I have a vendor come to me and say, "Hey, we solved this." And it's like, "Wow, perfect timing. This is exactly what I needed." And personalization really didn't do anything for me in a lot of these emails I see. It's a lot more timing and do I just truly have the problem? So I think that's the biggest misconception I constantly see.

That's the perfect tie-in. Timing is everything, right? I've bought a lot of software and it is hitting me at the right time. So when we talk about finding customers who already want to buy—timing—what does that mean both technically and practically?

Yeah, so on the practical side of things, it seriously varies per industry. And I think founders should really get in tune with their customer persona, their ICP, really understanding the pain points of when they have this problem and then understanding what are the current signs of them having this problem? I think as people have noticed, hiring signals for a certain role they look to automate is a great basic one-size-fits-all sort of solution, but you really can get niche with someone has a bad Google review that mentions this and I solve that sort of problem. And so really understanding what the pain points are and what those signs of pain points for founders is the key way to figure out how would we target people that have the problem and are already looking for a solution?

The targeting and the signals—I think we've done crazy signals for clients anywhere from scraping outage maps to figure out if a company has an internet outage, can we sell them internet coverage, and really targeting based on your specific vertical? I really don't like to pitch a one-size-fits-all signal because I generally don't think it exists.

And then in actual technicality, what that looks for after you find and understand your pain point and ICP is it's a lot of custom scraping. I don't think the future is these big static contact databases with data that you just pull from. I think in the future every company, every salesperson will be live scraping the internet for all the information they need as soon as they need it. So that's what we kind of try to build as a platform—can we have a salesperson that's non-technical just write a sales script like, "Hey, I need this information right now and this is super important for me to understand if this person needs our service or product?" And so we kind of build that technically, and we have AI write these very technical, complex scrapers with all the infrastructure we used to build as an agency that we used to manually write, and giving that access to the modern salesperson and the sales reps to do a lot of that pinpoint targeting themselves because they often tend to be the most creative people. After being on a couple hundred sales calls, they'll understand, okay, this is the type of person that converts super easily. They have these XYZ traits, but a lot of times they're gated by the fact that they can't actually get access to those leads because they can't write those scrapers themselves. So how do I get access to that data? And so we're trying to bridge that gap. And I think that's technically also how we do it.

Yeah, that's really interesting. Actually, a lot of times earlier in my career when I was selling, I would always ask somebody if they came inbound or found us. I'd always try to ask them, "What was the thing you were thinking about before you tried to find us? Like, what was that problem you were trying to solve?" And a lot of times they can't remember what it is, but if you can find out right before they're searching whatever they search to find you, that's the real need in the market for whatever you're selling, product or service.

Exactly.

Bihar, you've already built and exited a company before finishing school. What did those early ventures teach you about building products like today based on your past experience?

Good question. Yeah, for context, the last company I started was called Kitchen Connect and it was a ghost kitchen company. We would fill chefs into restaurant spaces to use those restaurant spaces, and this was in the midst of COVID. So it did very well based on a timing sort of situation of all these restaurants were empty. And like I said before, 80% of my time in that business was sales. It was door-knocking on these restaurants, pitching them, "Hey, do you guys want extra revenue?" It was showing up at restaurant conferences, pitching all these people. And for a lot of it, I realized that a lot of time I would spend on not actually talking to customers was on scraping, figuring out who I talk to, what are the restaurants I hit today, in what order? And a lot of that, looking back, I just don't think was necessary if I had Orange Slice back then. So I'd say it taught me a lot of the fundamentals.

As the founder of that company, it was all bootstrapped and just ran by me, and even when I exited, it just ran by me and some contractors. It really taught me how sales worked. I was truly the only sales rep for that company. I just lived the problems, a lot of the problems I'm solving today. So it really set me up to build this company in that sense of actually just living the problems of all the back-end research of trying to figure out if this restaurant actually had time or space for an empty chef to fill in.

Restaurant space is tough. I spend a lot of time in that space. I enjoy that space a lot. You also worked for much larger companies back in the day—like the small little company called JP Morgan, if memory serves me correct. That's very different than startup land. And I think oftentimes we talk about how you can't take someone out of a big giant company and expect them to be successful in a startup where there's a lack of red tape and there's a lot of ambiguity. And generally speaking, I do believe that's very true. But I think there are some things that carry over. How did that time at JP Morgan help you think about markets and scale and what you want to do moving forward, and contrast that with the scrappiness that you talk about?

Yes, it was a completely different switch for me. It's actually where I really got close to my co-founder. We were both roommates in New York while we were working. He was working at RAMP and I was working at JP Morgan. And the biggest reason why I decided to actually work for a very, very big company is you see how those companies operate. And I think a lot of college new grads and startup founders just want to start companies, but oftentimes you don't see a lot of the B2B problems in the world until you actually work for a B2B company and see, okay, wow, this is the whole B2B side of things. A lot of young founders I see are very B2C focused because they're only a consumer and they've never really worked anywhere. So they don't understand the pains of working in a big organization. So they can't solve those problems.

So for me it was always like a tactical step in my journey. I really wanted to first of all work for a great company and then also see what it's like and the systems understanding on how to set up these systems, manage people, set up structure. That's always something you can take away from these really big companies. They're big for a reason. They've done things well in the past. So learning from their models on how they operate and how they're still successful I think also helps you scale a company as well.

But very much so, it's a very different culture where you are given a set task and you basically follow those tasks. There's no ambiguity or scrappiness. I think overall everyone goes from 9 to 5 and clocks out. You check the box. Yes, exactly. Where there's many differences, but there's also, I think, a lot of things you learn through those big companies. And so there's pros and cons. I always like to say, and kind of how I've approached life is I'd like to just experience as much as possible and hopefully synthesize that and help me build the company that I'm looking to build.

And I generally think if I didn't go through that experience, Orange Slice wouldn't understand how giant B2B sales processes work, of like a six to nine month enterprise cycle, because I've seen a lot of those internally. And so being on the other side of the coin, you start to understand a lot of those dynamics, whereas I only did very small sort of deals selling to restaurants. And so it gave me a lot of a clear scope and picture of the full world of sales.

# Transcript

It's funny. I think SMB people talk about SMB all the time, right? Oh, you know, you just sell SMB and like I sell Enterprise. Dale sells Enterprise. So I can make fun of like Dale's time at Oracle. While SMB is super high velocity and certainly your deals are lower, I would argue SMB can be just as hard, if not harder than enterprise for a variety of reasons. I sold into restaurants for years. I worked for Toast. And it was one of the hardest sales I ever had. But you learn a skill set that I think is very transferable to enterprise. That said, I don't think you could go from enterprise to SMB successfully. I think that it's virtually impossible.

I totally agree with that. Like it's such a different game when I looked at it of just convincing people. You don't really have key decision makers and thinking about the org dynamics and giving them materials to pitch internally. With SMBs, it's really just talking to the owner and seeing if you can get them on your side. And oftentimes the owners, their job is not to evaluate tools and optimize. It's just focusing on their business. So there are so many different things you have to think about when you're selling to both different structures.

I couldn't relate to that more. It's so different.

Yeah, let's talk about the future. So prospecting, God willing, is going to change over the next few years. Let's zoom out five years. What does prospecting look like in a truly AI-native world?

I think in five years, truly AI-native, I've always made the analogy to how content looks now. I think content is very AI-native of your feed determines who you are and what content you like. And for the most part, it finds content I like more than I actually choosing the content. And I think prospecting is still so far behind in that sense. We're still trying to manually figure out: is this person a good customer for us? And in the future, AI should be doing a lot of that heavy lifting. And then it should be a sort of content algorithm, but instead like a sales-led algorithm where we have these suggested buyers that are usually very good, and the algorithm gets better over time as you sell and give more data about your company. And it should just be on autopilot, and then you go through the act of actually just making the sale happen. And that's kind of how I see it versus now. It's very manual. We're building lists, we're trying to theorize what is the best fit for our company. We're looking at our internal data, mapping those metrics out to signals possibly. We're talking to our actual sales leads, like Dale mentioned, just asking, "Hey, how did you find us?" et cetera. And this manual process, I think, hurts both buyers and sellers. Sellers are just overloaded with tools, and then buyers are just overloaded with volume and constant sort of spam messages and all these people. And just kind of how content feels really great now today, like I just get the content only I want, and it's amazing. I think sales will move into that direction of buyers and sellers will just be connected through AI, and we don't have to actually go through a lot of the hurdles of listening to messages about products we don't want.

So do SDRs go away?

I don't think they do. I think the role fundamentally changes, right? I think sales reps will always exist because, at least what I've seen, sales is so relationship-based. Oftentimes we're buying products from people we trust and that we test with and from relationships we formed over time. And I actually think a lot of sales moves towards that lens of us actually using products and vendors that we trust or know about. And SDRs, their job doesn't become talking to people and sending more emails and more cold calls, but it becomes: Hey, we have this super high-intent sales algorithm of all these customers that we know want our product. Let's start nurturing them. How can we set up events with them? Start building trust and rapport. I think the whole role shifts. And I think even SDRs that do a lot of cold calling will say they're definitely probably excited for a shift like this to happen as well because cold calling, cold email can be brutal.

Terrible. So tough.

Yeah, it is so tough. I'm a bit curious as you guys have gone into your next evolution. For you, you've built this initial piece. Originally you were thinking about how do we do something that's more approachable from a Clay perspective. Then you're going into the evolution of signals. Where do you see your product evolving over time where you're not going to get sucked into the vortex of like where everyone else is doing everything?

Yeah, yeah. For us, our path is very clear. Our mission is just to connect buyers and sellers at a way more efficient rate than sort of volume and current tooling. So that might change over time or is flexible. And right now that's like sequencers, and we really don't think that's the future. It's the reason why we haven't really built in that direction. And for us, I think in the future, it'll be the sort of middle layer. Kind of how we all have a platform of choice for content, whether that's YouTube, Instagram, Netflix, I think there'll be a platform of choice for finding sort of sales leads and prospecting, and hopefully Orange Slice is that place. We'll get such a great recommendation engine. And I think all those recommendation engines are eventually powered by data. That's why we're staying in the data layer first. How can we collect really great data? How can we scrape and get really great buying signals? And then eventually abstracting that all away of just showing you great customers for your company and not having to actually input and type the things you want. That's the evolution and kind of how our progression works. And why we actually started with an easier-to-use version than Clay is because I think the data layer is the fundamental thing that makes these content platforms really, really great at the recommendation engine.

And there you have it.

All right, we're going to switch into some rapid fire and wrap it up. So ten words or less. Ideally, if you had to start over with zero dollars today, what would you build?

I would be a go-to-market agency. It's the last thing I did. We did really well with that. I think go-to-market is my passion and also a lot of my skill set. I think I've spent a couple years now in this industry. I understand a lot of the verticals, and I think skills compound. So if you took all my money away from me, I would still have those skills of what tools to use and what scenario. And I can give a lot of that feedback and expertise to clients. So even though people say go-to-market agencies are really, really competitive, it's a space I really love and breathe.

What's a piece of advice that you took that you wish you didn't take as a startup?

That's really a great question, Dale. Looking at time, he adds some value to the fam show. But I think the biggest one, especially being in the Silicon Valley YC community, you'll hear a lot of advice from a lot of companies of: we did this this way. And what I've come to learn is you actually shouldn't really listen to anyone's advice. You should take it with a grain of salt and also keep their experience in mind. But a lot of the advice I ended up hearing, for certain companies, was very company-specific. So how a company, I think in sales, it's very, very common. A company said, you know, I used this cold email copy and it did really well for me, or I did this strategy of scraping and going to these sort of events. And every time I've seen that or tried it internally or tried it with customers, it's just never been the case. So I think advice, especially in the go-to-market sales motion, is never one-size-fits-all. A lot of times it's experimentation of throwing stuff against the wall, seeing what sticks, and then juicing whatever stuck against the wall and trying to get as much value from it.

It's a point in time. I think that's the problem. There's too many variables that happen in the space, and it's like you can narrow down some of the variables, but there's too many dimensions to say like this is going to work for your company at this point in time. Which is why I find it funny that people go after like all these old advisors or people that are like, I did it this way back in like the nineties, two thousands. Like, okay?

Yeah, like direct mail was very big, and it's like things change.

Or direct mail might come back, right?

That's true. I've been actually theorizing...

If you do it right. If you do it right. If Orange Slice is the next billion-dollar company, what changes in sales?

I think in sales, Adam doesn't exist.

No, I think people like you are actually way more important for sales organizations because now you're not bogged down with the actual building. Now you're sort of limited to thinking about how creative we can get with revenue and sources of revenue. So people like you guys, where you've seen...

I've tested so many things because I think a hundred X more valuable because that will be the true limitation for sales companies of how can, for our specific use case, what revenue sort of metrics and revenue systems can we put in place that are super valuable. And so I think what changes for us is completely the SDR AE sort of pipeline shifts from a lot of this manual, putting hours in, grindy sort of sales motion to being more creative, more high-level thinking and building these systems through natural language. And I think that's how, if we're a billion dollar company, that's the thing that changed in sales. There's a lot less sort of grindy work and there's a lot more creativity that needs to be pushed.

Yeah, I love that. I actually was listening to a podcast or some content, and they were basically saying as we evolve in the world, like as we evolve through this process with AI, forget about—they were talking about sales, but what they were saying is that it's on a one-to-one basis where salespeople, executives, people can be more creative because you can fail a lot faster, you can test a lot more things. Like, there becomes this iterative cycle. I just wonder in the world, are people really super creative? One and two, can they get their mind wrapped around the change, the speed at which change is going to happen? So it's yet to be seen. Last one as we wrap up: dream vacation destination?

Dream vacation I haven't taken a vacation in a while, but I would say Michigan is up there. It's where I'm from. I always like to go back home. I think a cool place to travel that I haven't been, probably South Africa if I was to be completely honest. I've never been to Africa.

And I think a lot of people are falling in love with Asia and traveling in Asia, but I don't see too much love to Africa. And I'd always love to see safaris, animals, open plains, things like that. I'm a very nature person, being from the Midwest and Michigan.

I love it. Thank you for sharing all of your knowledge. Thanks for talking outbound. Thanks for talking Orange Slice. Other than LinkedIn, where can people find you? Where can people learn more about Orange Slice?

Yeah, so we can learn more about Orange Slice at OrangeSlice.ai. It's free to try. We have a self-serve. You can sign up, no credit card, play around. We're always looking for feedback and to make the product better. You can find me on LinkedIn and X are primarily the two social platforms I use. Not too big into social media, but I'm trying as a founder now. I think it's super important to post more content. I'm learning from you guys as well, how you guys do content podcasts. I got to get into that game as well. You guys do it really well at Revenue Reimagined. And we're also really active in Slack as well. So if you want to join our Slack on our company website, we answer questions. We host office hours every Friday. We love talking go-to-market and talking with agencies as well.

I could say the Slack channel is real. There's really good people in there. There are really good conversations happening. I enjoy that Slack channel.

Cool. Varun, thanks for joining, man.

Thank you guys so much. Appreciate it.