We were lucky to catch up with Zach Wright recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Zach thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start big picture – what are some of biggest trends you are seeing in your industry?
In B2B Sales, there is a strong shift towards personalization and value selling. While it has always been important, it is now the only way forward to creating new meaningful conversations with prospective customers.
In the golden age of software, anyone and everyone could have been a potential customer with bloated experimental budgets and a bull market. Sellers could blast their message to the world and might find many potential fits in this approach. In order to succeed in today’s market, B2B sellers must be creative and obsessed with value added for their customers. A seller must identify what are the challenges a customer is facing and outreach with a perspective or a “value hypothesis” on how they can add value and align with the prospect’s direction. Finding these prospects with the right problems that sellers can solve is a massive challenge.
Syft AI is a “value matching” platform that surfaces those value matches and guides sellers on what value they can add and operationalize their outreach with the right contacts and contextually relevant messaging. Syft uses a single system approach and generative AI to automate value selling at scale and create efficiency in leading sales teams down the path of account research → account prioritization → territory organization → collaboration → tailored value messaging → contact recommendations and personalization.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I played football at Trinity University (’14) and studied Marketing and Economics. Football taught me discipline, being part of something bigger, and how to work on a team built around trust. My dad had a very successful career in software sales, so when I didn’t know what to pursue during college after pivoting away from pre-med, I set my eyes on sales.
During my childhood, my dad led an incredible team at Oracle, and I coincidentally had a friend working there who could get me an interview during my summer internship before my senior year in 2013. After the internship, I got a full-time offer to begin after my graduation in June 2014. I quickly moved from entry-level into inside sales and then field sales. For two out of three years, I made “Presidents Club”. For Oracle, that is considered the top 1% of sellers at the company. After Oracle, I spent 3 years at Informatica as a field seller covering the central US in many different territories. One year, I traveled so much into the territory, I had over 100 flights to cities like Cincinnati, Louisville, Little Rock, and other central US hot cities. I eventually earned a role to cover the local territory of Austin, Texas. Given the opportunity to move into Sales leadership, I took a role leading a new field sales team back at Oracle covering specific verticals across North America as a regional sales director. In this role, I found my passion for helping sellers reach their full potential. Our team had an incredible year and it was a very hard decision to leave only a year later, but it was to co-found Syft AI.
I co-founded this company with Lee Rodgers and Peter Katsos. Lee and I have been best friends since the 4th grade. We always wanted to start a company together, and when we got introduced to our third co-founder and CTO (peter), we learned our vision was possible from a technical perspective and Syft AI was born. Lee and I both had ~9 years of software experience, so we had the domain expertise of prospecting and identified a massive gap in the market. Most companies were overwhelming their users with massive amounts of data leaving the user with more questions than answers. There were many applications a seller would have to stitch together coupled with many manual processes that created a huge barrier to prospecting.
Syft is a SaaS application that automates and scales Value Selling for companies. It addresses the two main obstacles hindering scalable value selling:
1. Siloed sales technology hampers sales processes and obscures essential data required for effective value messaging.
2. Automating personalized value messaging for individual prospects remains unachievable, even with advanced generative AI tools like chat GPT.
Syft addresses these problems to enable value selling by:
1. Consolidating all of the data and technology tools needed to value sell in one application
2. Our AI comprehends the problems, solutions, and value of our customer’s products within the context of a “problem event” (like an acquisition).
3. We automate research to identify and rank prospective accounts experiencing specific “problem events” (such as an acquisition)
4. Using generative AI and problem-solution-value understanding, we automate value messaging at scale based on the specific “problem events” at each prospective account
Syft (syftai.com) was created by sellers for sellers.
Highlights:
-In June, right before my year anniversary of going full time, we closed our first multi-year commitment (3-year commitment) with a data management services company. Syft will help guide their go-to-market strategy, helping their new hires onboard quickly and focus on the right prospects to find a healthy pipeline. It was a major milestone, as our customer put their long term faith in Syft moving forward and shared our same vision for value selling.
-Welcomed Cart.com co-founder Remington Tonar to our advisory board who helped Cart raise over $400M in funding in 2 years, earning one of the fastest paths to “unicorn status” in history.
-Recently hired our first sales hire outside of the founding team to help expand our market share in Zane Gamboa.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
As a first-time co-founder, there is a lot to learn about jumping into the entrepreneurial scene and getting used to wearing many hats in the company. As I am writing this, my wife (Marion) and I are 1 month out from bringing our first child into the world. As I prepare to become a first-time dad, my plan is to be disciplined and have efficient attention management to adapt to this new role as a father and continue to move Syft AI forward.
As you can imagine, there is a ton of anxiety that comes with starting a company. I recently went to a mindset retreat called “Arise” by Alluviance. My favorite quote from the founder (Alex Kremer) “The purpose of a vision isn’t so you achieve it…it is who it causes you to be today.” We were prompted to write about what we look like in 20 years. What does that person look like? How does that person act around others? What are their key character traits? This mindset changed my perspective that I can be the leader I want to be today. Many 1st time founders have “imposter syndrome,” but it doesn’t have to be this way.
Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?
I met Lee Rodgers in the 4th grade and we have been best friends ever since. Lee was always a standout athlete and we bonded quickly over football. We parted ways after high school to both play college football. I played at Trinity University and he played at Texas A&M. Lee went a different path than me majoring in Biomedical sciences and went to UT’s medical school in Houston. Despite excellent grades, Lee quickly decided he no longer wanted to pursue a career in healthcare, he joined me in technology sales at Oracle in 2014. 8 years later, Lee had an incredible track record in software sales at both Oracle and Workday as a consistent overachiever. Lee taught himself how to code and became obsessed with learning AI, focusing on neural networks. Lee has the unique background of being both a domain expert in software sales but also a deep understanding of the technical side as well and is one of our core developers. He is a great leader because he can relate to both sides of the team. He deeply understands our customers’ problems and can architect the experience to solve these problems.
Lee and I met Peter Katsos (our third co-founder) through a very close friend. Lee and I shared what we wanted to accomplish and were delighted to find a technical leg to the tri-pod that could architect the platform to automate and scale “Value Selling” for our customers. Peter has his engineering degree from Virginia Tech and masters in entrepreneurial studies from Babson College. Peter was the lead solution architect at “Optimizely” helping some of the largest online brands optimize their digital experiences.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.syftai.com
- Instagram: zwright29
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachwrightsyft/
- Twitter: @zachwrightsyft
- Youtube: @zachwrightsyft
- Other: Lee Rodgers LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leerodgers/ Peter Katsos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-katsos-875a25125/
Image Credits
Wedding photos: Sloane Photo (Shannon Wilson) Photo with dogs in front of house: @frontportraits (www.frontportraits.com)