Mark Wright, VP of Sales at Kognitos Automation, discusses the intersection of enterprise sales and AI solutions on this episode of BeyondSaaS hosted by Jason Niedle. He shares insights on how Kognitos is revolutionizing automation, the challenges of growth in a competitive market, and innovative (yet old school) marketing strategies for lead generation. Mark emphasizes the importance of building a strong sales team and culture, navigating the rapidly changing AI landscape, and offers advice for emerging sales leaders.
Takeaways
- Always do the hardest thing first in your day.
- The market for automation is underserved.
- Setting ambitious sales growth goals is crucial.
- Competition in AI and automation is intense.
- Unique marketing strategies can enhance lead generation.
- Building relationships is key in sales.
- Understanding customer needs is essential for product development.
- Sales teams should adapt to rapid market changes.
- Leadership and culture are vital for a successful sales team.
Sound Bites
- “Eat the frog, do the hardest thing first.”
- “People buy from people they like.”
Show Notes
BeyondSaaS Transcript
Jason Niedle
Today we’re talking with Mark Wright, VP of Sales of Kognitos about how to grow your company through enterprise sales as well as AI solutions to common business challenges.
Welcome to Beyond SaaS Mark. Before we jump in, have you got a golden nugget for us today?
Mark Wright
Well, thanks for having me, Jason. You know, a personal golden nugget I talk about with some of my team and what I do is nothing new but I’m a big fan of Brian Tracy’s book, Eat the Frog. So, you know, my point today is always do that hardest thing first, first thing in the morning. And I try to do that. I always write down a couple of things late at night that do not delay, get them done,
That’s my little golden nugget that I’ve done for years and years and years now and I hope others do as well.
Jason Niedle
I think that’s super important. have a 10 year old and I keep trying to teach him that. Like he wants to avoid the hard things. I’m like, just eat the frog, just do the hard thing and get it over with.
Mark Wright
There you go. The day will be much, smoother after that.
Jason Niedle
My golden nugget is random. was just thinking about how much time Instacart saves me and how I have much healthier food when I use it. So food delivery services from the grocery store saves me from eating out every single
So a little bit about Mark. Mark is an enterprise sales expert with many, many millions in sales. I saw at one company alone you had over $16 million closed, which is fabulous. You’re now the VP of sales at Kognitos, which allows companies to unlock productivity using AI. And it looks like they can simplify even complex automations with measurable ROI and impact. So that sounds amazing.
I am Jason Niedle founder of Tethos. For the last 22 years, we’ve been experts at accelerating tech company growth through strategy, branding, lead gen, and conversion. So again, welcome, Mark. Tell me a little bit about Kognitos and how you see your role there.
Mark Wright
Yeah, so I lead a sales team here at Kognitos helping enterprise customers automate repetitive manual tasks. Certainly not the first company to be in that space, but how we look at it is very different. Built on an AI model there, serverless cloud solution where we can deploy agents rather quickly looking at back office and front office tasks where people are manually repeating these processes day in and day out…
typically within finance, HR, IT and other use cases. Historically that was kind of an RPA use cases and now we’re able to spin them up quickly with less infrastructure and less team needed to actually manage those automations as well.
Jason Niedle
So what would you say motivates you and then what are you trying to accomplish at Kognitos?
Mark Wright
What motivates me is, you know, twofold. One, I mean, I’m in the professional sales to, you know, kind of chart my own destiny and be able to work as I need to, to be able to help support my clients as well as my family on a personal level. But the thing with Kognitos is we saw an opportunity in the marketplace that was being underserved. A lot of my previous clients
we’re simply having trouble on the ROI story. The larger that their automation team grew and the more they were actually supporting the business units, the worse the ROI got for them because it took that much more people to actually manage these things to support the business. What Kognitos is doing is simply turning it on its head where now we’re leveraging business to be involved in the journey, to be able to help us automate these things rather quickly.
and then bring some of that money back to IT to make more informed strategic decisions around AI specifically.
Jason Niedle
Very cool. And where would you say Kognitos is in the growth stage? Are you guys start up or mid stage or how would you place yourself?
Mark Wright
I would still consider us a startup. We’re a series A company today. When I joined two years ago, still seed funded, had a handful of mid-market manufacturing clients. And then in last two years really started to propel and get into some large logos across the globe and enterprise. What’s great about the enterprise is that they have bigger problems to solve, which typically means a bigger spend to help solve those problems.
And that’s really been transformational for us over the last 18 months, getting into enterprise. And now it’s really in that scale phase, know, scale from a product standpoint, as well as from a people standpoint, we’re certainly hiring in a lot of roles and strictly sales to take that message out to the marketplace and ensure that, we’re helping the CIOs formulate their AI agenda over the next, two, five years.
Jason Niedle
Sure. And how would you describe your big goal for this year in terms of growth?
Mark Wright
It’s a lofty one. would be somewhere in the measure of 6x, 7x of sales that we did last year. So certainly, eager to hit those goals. I think now’s the time, especially with the agentic revolution that you may or may not be hearing or reading about. I think AI is overall the big picture item that everyone’s talking about. I think there’s this really unique spot right now for agentic automation.
where now we don’t have to have the entire playbook of a process or a use case. We can simply, onboard an agent as if you would an employee within your line of business, give them some parameters and details about what their job would be, and then allow them to handle some of these things. You know, at first it’s a small piece that they’re doing. And as they learn more and more, starts to really see
and not just bottom line but top line impact to the business as well. So, lofty goals … I”m excited for this year ahead with the agentic strategy that we have in place.
Jason Niedle
That’s very cool. So obviously that’s a huge goal. What are the challenges you see to getting that?
Mark Wright
A couple of things, one, the competition is fierce in our space, absolutely. There is a lot of companies right now that are speaking about AI and agentic, and there’s, know, RPA players that have been doing this. I mean, that’s one, so it’s really important that we differentiate ourselves strongly, not just in the field calls, right, but holistically, how we go to the market, how we share over all of our different social platforms.
and things like that. And the other is people, right? We need great people here at Kognitos to help us get out there with our vision. I think we’ve got a really strong team now, but it’s important that we keep our culture. We have such a beautiful culture that we’ve built at Kognitos and that we’re able to keep that as we sustain and grow and build along the way.
Jason Niedle
So if you had a magic wand and you could wave it and change one thing that would fix one of those problems, what do think you would fix? What would you do?
Mark Wright
one would be, you know, how do we get to the C- level better? Right. how do we get our message across to them around the true differentiators of Kognitos rather than one by one? Right, Jason, instead of you and me meet. And now we’re going through this and we’re understanding, we’re deciding
you know, how can we quickly get that message out so that when we get on the calls with them, it’s one step further in the sales cycle. That’s really something that I’m working on right now with our marketing team is how best to showcase that. Cause we believe we truly have a unique product in the marketplace. It’s just, it’s a small and mighty team. And how do we get that out to the executives before we actually jump on a call?
Jason Niedle
I don’t know, you seem pretty good on podcasting here.
Mark Wright
Okay, maybe I’ll do more of these.
Jason Niedle
What are some things that you’ve been doing that have been working well?
Mark Wright
I’ll tell you one interesting thing we’ve been doing. And right now the name of the game, Jason, is the more opportunities and calls we have, the better off we’ll be. We’ve actually went old school a little bit.
We are now doing a bunch of campaigns around actually sending mail to our prospects. I know that’s not a new thing, but I think we forgot a little bit about it. So I’ve got everyone on my team, know, having their top 50 CIOs that they need to speak with, and we’re putting together some unique packaging to send to them in their office of why, you know, previous automation is archaic. You can imagine.
some of the stuff we’re putting in those boxes around dinosaurs, right? Getting a little unique there. And why now is the time to switch to agentic and a new agentic player, Kognitos. It’s been really effective. I find if you send something to somebody, in kind will take that call. And we’re starting to really see a lot of high impact pipeline coming from that output and initiative. So excited for that one. It’s a little unique, a little old school, but it’s working.
Jason Niedle
I think this is the first time I’ve heard mail that word in any of these conversations, right? So that’s pretty cool. But absolutely, like if you have the right people and you can target them in the right way, it opens their eyes and it gives you a little bit of visibility. Super random idea, but I saw this Kickstarter the other day and they have these itty bitty little TVs and they’re about this big and they’re 50 bucks and you can load them up with your own content. And I was thinking, how can I use those for a mail campaign?
Because you could ship someone this itty bitty cool looking little TV for 50 bucks, And they get it and it has your messaging on there. And then every time they touch the button, it switches to another channel, which is just another one of your videos. And I’m like, that would be a great marketing tool. You get someone semi warm and then you send them this little TV, right?
Mark Wright
Interesting, you have to send that link. I’m certainly interested to try that. And yeah, I think everyone’s facing the same thing in enterprise sales. It’s like, they’re just inundated with emails and everything else, right? And especially in our space is very competitive, right? When I should talk about earlier with, you know, agent force and others, and it’s easy to get lost in that message. So I still believe people buy from people they like.
and getting something unique in the mail is exciting. more often than not, I think they’re willing to take that call or at least put you in touch with the person that should be speaking with you.
Jason Niedle
Right. So you talked about like the competition’s fierce and you have to differentiate yourself and you have to find the right people. What other specific things are like blocking your growth?
Mark Wright
I think one thing that’s interesting in this space is that it moves really fast. Meaning that yesterday or a year ago, was Gen AI or a year and a half ago, we want to talk about Gen AI, right? And then it’s AI and then you get on calls and they say, well, can you generate this PowerPoint for me? I’ve heard AI does really well in that. it’s like, yes, there is absolutely a solution out there in the marketplace to help you do that.
but ours is helping you, you know, either reduce head counter and improve employee efficiency via automation on AI. so it does change rather quickly, whether it’s like English as code is important or still the drag and drop functionality. And it’s really important for me to work closely with our product team to share, Hey, this is what people want now. And this is what people want in the next six to 12 months. Again, making some assumptions based on.
my conversation in the field, but that’s been somewhat of a blocker at times, is just keeping up with the market and the ask or the demand from enterprise customers on what an AI platform would look like.
Jason Niedle
Yeah, absolutely. And change is so constant these days, everything changes all the time.
so how have you had to change over last seven years?
Mark Wright
Well, there was this big event in the middle of that, right, which was COVID. And that made everyone change how they do business, right? And I always talk to people about like getting in the field. I guess I sound a little old school with the mail thing and I’m still traveling in the field as much as possible. And I always talk to my team about this, like, yeah.
Jason, we can meet each other great. Like we can be on Zoom and understand and start to talk about some of your pain or challenges with your automation program and how Kognitos can help. But to really get deep, I think in a relationship standpoint to sell to the enterprise, know, large, large deals, we have to be out in front of our prospects, meeting them, meeting with the team. We do a great, it’s like a half day session.
called AI Unlock where we look at your current processes, make some assumptions. And at the end of that, you have a deliverable that says, you know, here’s where you can save money over the next 18 months via automation and AI as a lead behind so that we work together going forward.
.
Jason Niedle
that only for
clients or is that for leads?
Mark Wright
For leads as well, we talked about as like our third step, right? So, you we meet you, we talked a little bit at high level, does this make sense? Kind of, you know, socially dating there. And then we get into more, you know, demo, you know, let’s share about Kognitos, what we do. But the third step, Jason, is we need to get with your team. We’ll start with showing them overall. Here’s the macro trends. Here’s what Kognitos does really well. Okay, now you guys start sharing. And I’ve seen that go.
most of the time really well when you have executive support. I’m like, hey, like, you know, share with Kognitos what that magic wand question you said earlier, what’s the magic wand for your business unit? And I think they really love it because We have a great leave behind like just something on their desk to tell them, well, there’s millions of dollars in efficiencies we could be gaining with Kognitos. Let’s take this further. And that’s when we start getting into more deal specific. That’s not something I used to do, but sometimes it’s really working well.
for our client base here at Kognitos.
Jason Niedle
I feel like it’s such an obvious thing to say but when it’s clear that you say here’s the value of what you’re going to bring, right? And many of these AI things are not clear about the value in any way, shape or form, right? They’re like, okay, well, this is gonna help X, Y or Z but no one’s saying you’re going to save this much money.
Mark Wright
We do have a great tagline where we can give you ROI from the first year, which is typically unheard of in a lot of enterprise purchases. And that’s been really well [received]. I mean, another thing I don’t know to open up to the masses, but Something I’m doing now that I used to never do as well is doing money back guarantees. if you don’t like our product, no worries, give it back to us. Like not a problem. And no one’s taken us up on it yet.
Jason Niedle
Mm.
Mark Wright
But I think getting out of this POC realm that everyone’s been in enterprise for so long, it’s like we’re just delaying the savings we could be seeing. Let’s just get started. Everything makes sense from a security perspective, a buying perspective. If you hate it, you can call me and we’ll give you the money right back. That’s interesting. That’s like working in the enterprise more than it used to.
Jason Niedle
Yeah,
it’s interesting because we’ve done this for 22 years, so building websites and brands and all that, and we were essentially a service provider. We make you look good. And then about a year ago, we started focusing on the ROI. You know, great, we can make you look good, but am I generating leads and am I bringing you business? And as part of that, we started offering an ROI guarantee. And it’s
absolutely transformative, but it also transforms how I think about everything and my product has to be different when I’m delivering the ROI… just like as I’m sure now you guys have to think about your product entirely differently now that you know that like, this has to deliver that return.
Mark Wright
I don’t think the level of effort that we’ve given our clients has changed with that guarantee by any means But as a buyer, I certainly appreciate it, So we just kind of jumped into it and even pricing wise we’re like, what’s the ROI you expect from this, right? You’re saying this Great… So you’re willing to pay this price rather than getting into the SKU models that we’ve got these seven or eight different SKUs here
Let’s mold these together and get the right package for you. We’ve even kind of done some ROI calculations to get what works best for our clients.
Jason Niedle
That’s super interesting. So you’ve told me about mail, you’ve told me about actually traveling to see people, which a lot of people are not doing anymore. Any other cool marketing or sales hacks for our audience out there?
Mark Wright
I’m starting to dive into a little more the like AI agent SDR things. I’ve taken a couple calls there. We have not done that by any means. That’s something I’m really interested in and diving into. You know, we certainly have the current playbooks that everyone else has, right? Which we’re always tweaking to make sure that they’re most relevant, keeping it short and simple and sweet. And then
We’ve also looked in like fractional, salespeople and or SCRs and how you can, you know, leverage them without needing to, expand your footprint, you know, too big. And that’s something that’s really intriguing to us. But really those core like old school stuff is what’s working best for us today.
Jason Niedle
What have you guys been doing for lead gen?
Mark Wright
Lead Gen… we do have a core team of SDRs that we’ve hired and really armed them with your core companies like Outreach to help them with sequencing and how they would leverage that. Again, doing some unique events that really fit for us, like AI4 in Vegas has been absolutely great. The best AI event you can be at, and we’ve actually been speaking at that one.
And then getting our CEO out there. I mean, no one can share the vision better than him. That’s been a really great tool for us is whether it’s an event, he does some podcasts, some webinars, And we get a lot from there. I guess lastly, I would share the trial. We recently just released our first free trial experience of Kognitos and that’s actually been the best source.
of lead gen for us, not from a perspective of, hey, you tried it, let me reach out to you and see what I can sell you. But we found that a lot of people are working within the product and they’re looking for an API connection that isn’t readily available on the trial. And we’re able to work through their problem with them and then put together a business case on how this would work best and go forward that way. So that’s been a great lead gen for us is actually our free trial.
Jason Niedle
That’s really cool. You talked earlier about people. How do you select the right people, the right partners?
Mark Wright
Yeah, great question. We still fundamentally believe if you worked with someone in the past and they were great, that’s going to be the best person for us. We’ve tried a couple of different things. We found that having some background in the automation space, whether it be one of these big companies or smaller companies, doesn’t matter. But being able to have an intelligent conversation around your tech stack, what you’re using today, and some of the ROI back to it has been
really the best strategy for us. being said, we have a huge scale number, as I mentioned earlier, as well as a headcount number this year. So always open for the best talent out there to come help us bring this to the masses as well. So hoping that things like this will actually incur further talented candidates to approach us.
Jason Niedle
world is changing really rapidly as we’ve been discussing, what do you see as any upcoming trends in terms of marketing and sales?
Mark Wright
It’s an easy one to say, but the AI trend will be here to stay for a long time. I mentioned at the top, we’re in the agentic AI category and it’s APA now, agentic automation is what companies are driving on and doing. And I think Gartner has recently put out a study. That’s the number one thing on CIOs minds this year. So great. I firmly believe
in a couple years, two, three, it’s gonna be just AI as the category. So it’s really important for us to have short-term, medium, long-term vision of our product and solution and what that will be. Right now, it’s natural language English as code, right? Typing in line by line what you want to automate, handling exceptions in English, and then having the agent go out there and do the work. But I do believe the trend in the future in this space will be
know, pure AI with very little human input as needed. And we want to be the leader in that category as it comes in the years to come.
Jason Niedle
That’s amazing. What do you wish you could tell other Sales VPs who might be at an earlier spot than you?
Mark Wright
Well, first I would say like, you keep your head down and keep pushing. Again, with the change we talked about, Jason, it’s very easy to think, “Well, hey, we’re not doing it that way. Is that the right way? Are we, you know, in the wrong beat?” And we all have those things, right, that come to our mind that we think about. But the important thing is you have the right people.
in your company, from leadership level down, are you hiring the right people? Do you have the right people in your company? And do you believe in the long term vision of what you’re doing and are customers resonating with what you have on the truck today, then you’re in the right spot. Just keep pushing, just keep pushing and going forward and it’ll all work out. You whatever’s meant to be will be. I’ve certainly had those moments in my career here and other companies, but Every time I’ve just kept pushing forward, it’s always seemed to work
Jason Niedle
Great advice. Is there anything else you wanted to mention?
Mark Wright
Not at this time. It’s been a great experience, Jason. I appreciate us having this conversation and helping us share the message. if anybody wants to follow up with me directly to talk Kognitos, sales, movies, anything you want, happy to discuss at Mark @ Kognitos.com
Jason Niedle
And that’s K-O-G-N-I-T-O-S.com, K-O-G-N-I-T-O-S.com. Mark, thank you so much for being on Beyond SaaS. And if you out there are a leader in mid-stage tech looking to grow, please drop any questions, comments, or feedback below or at tethos.com. That’s my company, T-E-T-H-O-S.com. And of course, your likes and subscribes are super helpful. So until next time, this is Beyond SaaS.
