Episode 150:

How Salespeople Use Data, Salesforce vs. Snowflake, and How LLMs Are Transforming Sales with Brendan Short of Groundswell

August 9, 2023

This week on The Data Stack Show, Eric and Kostas chat with Brendan Short, the Co-Founder and CEO at Groundswell. During the episode, Brendan discusses his journey in being at Zoom during the high-growth stage in 2020 and his journey in founding Groundswell. They also discuss data models and how they create moats for startups, particularly in the sales space. The conversation also covers Brendan’s background in B2B SaaS go-to-market, the challenges of Salesforce’s data model, the potential of data warehouses as an alternative to Salesforce and the role of generative AI in improving user interfaces and sales processes, the future of data ownership, building trust in data-driven tools, and more.

Notes:

Highlights from this week’s conversation include:

  • Brendan’s background and journey to Groundswell (2:25)
  • The impact of generative AI on sales reps and product building (5:38)
  • Lead sourcing challenges (12:22)
  • Salesforce as a data model (14:30)
  • The need for guardrails in building applications around sales (24:37)
  • The question of interfaces in the layers of Salesforce (26:11)
  • A UI solution for sales and marketing (30:45)
  • The future of logic and machine learning models (37:11)
  • The battle for data ownership (39:36)
  • Actioning data and the role of refineries (46:03)
  • The potential for decentralized systems using generative AI (46:59)
  • Product building for the future (57:47)
  • Building trust in data tools (59:10)
  • The era of innovation (1:09:20)
  • Final thoughts and takeaways (1:10:43)

 

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, the CDP for developers. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.

RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.