We recently connected with Flora Muglia and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Flora, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

Zinnia started as an event planning business, building technology to streamline the event planning process. My co-founder, Lauren, and I both come from a sales background with experience at Salesforce and Microsoft so it was a natural transition to start planning sales events for the companies we worked with. We started to get the feedback that while supporting event logistics was important, the real ROI of the events came from the strategic discussions that the company was able to have with their customers in attendance. This was a real “aha” moment for us that started our pivot into AI-powered meeting prep and sales intelligence.

When I was at Microsoft, I developed and ran a 10-hour required training for the 120 sales reps on my team – teaching them HOW to do customer research. Microsoft had realized that understanding customer challenges should start with a foundational understanding of the company and industry, as well as the people sitting across from you. In our training, we taught sales reps how to do relationship mapping, track compelling events that might be a door opener for a sale, and read an annual report and other key reporting coming out of an organization – mapping solutions to problems, rather than just pushing technology. If companies are willing to invest in that level of training, taking their reps out of the field to learn to research, then if we can streamline that process and the right information at the right time, and how to use it in a discussion, then we could help turn “B level” reps into “A level” reps.

So we knew companies were willing to invest in this problem, and we heard from sales reps who told us they couldn’t stay on top of their calendars and simply didn’t have time to do this research. They would do a quick LinkedIn and company website scan right as their meeting was starting and call it good. But in this competitive landscape, good is not good enough, you need to be great.

Our approach with Zinnia is twofold – we want to help solve the problem of staying on top of your calendar, and enable you to double click into richer insights and teach you how to use them in sales conversations. We deliver a daily dossier to your inbox every morning at 6 am, so you can review who your meeting with and details on the company they work for while you sip your morning coffee. Next, we’re going to be launching rich portal insights – enabling you to pull a 10-K summary, tailored AI-generated discovery questions, compelling events, and points of commonality, all in a single pane of glass, so that you have the right information at the right time to build trust and get in the door when the time is right.

We’re taking a comprehensive approach that sets us apart, and we’re floating the information that we know reps need, not waiting for them to have to search it – because they may not know how to read a 10-K or what to ask for!

Flora, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I didn’t always want to be an entrepreneur.

I started my career in sales at Microsoft and immediately fell in love with working with customers, building their trust, and watching our shared relationship grow over the years.

A few years in, I had the opportunity to join a “startup” inside of Microsoft and be part of the founding team – growing their nonprofit industry business from the ground up. I was employee #10 and we had $100M in revenue at the time (for context: this is pennies at Microsoft, barely worth getting out of bed for), and grew it to over 200 employees and $1 billion in revenue in less than 5-years (company leaders were paying real attention at that point). It was a real toe dip into the startup world and I was hooked by the fast-paced, exciting nature of growing a business from the ground up.

That team provided me with opportunities to grow my strategy muscle above and beyond sales, first leading the Azure business in the org, and then as Chief of Staff. In those positions I got what felt like a hands-on MBA, learning how to run a business, manage a P&L, launch products and offerings, and build sales plays to drive growth. I also took on strategic projects from building a training program that taught our sales reps how to do customer research, to completing an industry market research project that defined our 3-year investment plan.

Ultimately, these skills gave me the confidence to take a leap of faith and follow a new dream – being on a founding team at an early stage startup and putting everything I learned to the test. I wanted to marry my customer obsession and passion for human connection with the strategic muscles I’d built – getting to holistically run and manage sales and operations.

My co-founder, Lauren Marturano, and I had met early in our careers at Microsoft and started to dream about building a business together. So when I was ready, it felt natural to join Zinnia and make our dream a reality.

It has been a fun, wild, exciting journey that has included a pivot from events to AI-powered meeting prep, but every learning has paved the way for where we are today.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

LinkedIn has above and beyond been our best source for new clients- and not due to outbound outreach. Any sales leader will tell you that outbound is really hard right now, people’s inboxes and InMails are bombarded with emails so it is hard to stand out from the crowd.

Surprisingly, we’ve found that posting to LinkedIn and building a community with our networks has been a great way to find new leads. We focus on authentic posts that combine business and personal passions, and try to add consistent, authentic value. By sharing, and then engaging with posts from others in our networks, we’ve been able to genuinely build an awesome community, and the upside has been it has also opened the door with new prospects.

We’ve also built a newsletter, ReveNews, that has sales tips and ways to use AI for free to help accelerate your sales and we share it bi-weekly with our network on LinkedIn.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

I highly recommend “Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making,” Tony Fadell is an absolute genius who launched iPod, iPhone and eventually Nest. He offers great tips on how to build a product that people want, even before they know they want it.

I love podcasts and really enjoy “Lenny’s Podcast: Product | Growth | Career” as well as “How I Built This.” Both interview entrepreneurs and leaders at startups and companies, offering a perspective into how they got to where they are today. It’s easy to focus on what a company is today, but in my opinion the sausage making behind how it was built and came to be is so much more interesting – learning from the failures, the successes, and the creative strategies that end up making a company who they are.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.getzinnia.ai/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getzinnia/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/flora-muglia/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/getzinnia
• Other: https://revenews.substack.com/