In this episode, Jason Niedle speaks with Chris May, Senior Director of Global Sales at Sapien, about the intersection of AI and business growth. They discuss the innovative approach of Sapien in the data labeling space, the importance of customer engagement, and the challenges faced by startups in a rapidly evolving market. Chris shares insights on effective sales strategies, the significance of discipline in sales, and the impact of AI on business operations. The conversation highlights the need for adaptability and active listening in sales, as well as the importance of staying informed about new technologies.
Takeaways
- Your first 10 customers are worth more than your first 100 hires.
- Sapien aims to create the Uber for data labeling and collection.
- Cold calling remains a vital strategy for lead generation.
- Discipline is crucial for success in sales.
- Companies are hesitant to invest heavily in AI projects.
- The AI industry evolves rapidly, requiring constant adaptation.
- Active listening is essential for effective sales conversations.
- Hiring for mission-driven qualities can enhance team performance.
- Staying informed about new tools is critical for growth.
- Sales teams must be nimble to navigate market changes.
Sound Bites
“We want to create the Uber for data labeling.”
“Active listening is key in sales.”
“The industry evolves in months, not years.”
Show Notes
BeyondSaaS Transcript
Jason Niedle (00:00)
Today we’re talking with Chris May, Senior Director of Global Sales at Sapien about growing an innovative AI company.
Welcome to Beyond SaaS. I’m Jason Niedle, founder of Tethos. We’re a growth agency and we’ve been accelerating tech company growth through strategy, branding, lead generation and conversion with a 20 year track record of success. If you’re looking to grow, check out tethos.com/podcast for our paper on hyper growth tactics compiled from interviews with people like Chris here.
Or easier yet, just drop the word GROWTH in the comments and I’ll DM you. Today I’m super excited to explore tech company growth with Chris May, who is in Taiwan. Thank you for joining us. And Chris is Senior Director of Global Sales at Sapien, which empowers organizations to streamline knowledge sharing and team collaboration with human training and gamifying AI.
So it looks like they have 80,000 contributors around the world helping to classify fine-tuned tests and train AI models. And I want to hear about this because it’s such an interesting merger of machine and human. Chris has extensive global sales leadership experience, driving strategic growth. And I hear some fun facts that Chris has traveled around the country playing the violin in hospitals and volunteered in Cambodia and Vietnam. So Chris, super interesting. Welcome.
Chris May (01:02)
Yeah.
Thank you, happy to be here Jason.
Jason Niedle (01:16)
Hey, before I forget, do you happen to have a golden nugget for us today?
Chris May (01:19)
Yeah, my golden nugget for the day is your first 10 customers are worth more than your first 100 hires.
Jason Niedle (01:26)
Ooh, let me think about that. My first 10 customers are worth more than my 100 hires. How do we get those first 10 customers?
Chris May (01:33)
By just talking to people. It’s as simple as it sounds.
Jason Niedle (01:36)
I love it. So tell me a little bit about Sapien.
Chris May (01:38)
Sure, yeah, so small correction there. We currently have a little bit over 600,000 people on platform. I think in the last two or three months have had a bunch of influencers on YouTube started posting about us.
I personally, I’ve been in the data labeling space for about seven, eight years now, helping, large companies, enterprise companies, fine tune their models, build models, whatever the case may be. And Sapien is kind of a new way, looking at the problem, the data labeling problem, right? This industry has gone to more of a, we don’t like to use the word sweatshop, but you get the idea of you have these like large labeling centers, people kind of earning,
know sub-opinal wages and working conditions aren’t that great and we want to be able to use blockchain technology to essentially bring traceability and ownership back to the labeler and ultimately reduce overhead so people can work from home, go online, use our platform, label data in a more gamified way so that it’s you know it’s more fun right and then you know
pay is a little bit higher because you don’t have to hire an entire team, management, office space, and so on and so forth. that’s the thesis.
product obviously has shifted tremendously in the last year or so because of how quickly this industry has evolved. But yeah, it’s been a crazy journey and I think the long-term idea is to create the Uber for data labeling and collection where any type of request from enterprises around the world can be fulfilled by some sapien that has a unique skill and knowledge to be able to contribute to building better AI.
Jason Niedle (03:03)
That’s really powerful. say that again, because it was really like a powerful statement of all of it.
Chris May (03:08)
I think the end goal here is to create sort of like an Uber for data labeling and data collection, right? Where enterprise customers can have a request put on our platform and somewhere around the world, right sapiens can be able to contribute their knowledge or their time, right? By fulfilling these requests and then get paid essentially.
Jason Niedle (03:29)
And so the problem that businesses
are facing is that they have, like every tech company I talk to is jumping into AI, and yet the AI are not always accurate or they’re making mistakes or they haven’t been trained properly and they need a workforce somehow magically, instantly, rapidly, and you guys can actually provide that.
Chris May (03:36)
Thanks.
Yeah.
Exactly. That’s pretty much it. Yeah, there’s many different terms for it. RLHF is a great one, Reinforced Learning with Human Feedback. That is the current hot term for it. But yeah, like if you think about like a Chat GPT, right, you can ask it maybe a legal or a healthcare related question that it may not be able to answer that accurately. And then you need, a physician that speaks Italian, for example, to like fix the Italian version of the Chat GPT. The thesis
you’d be able to go on the Sapien platform and locate this person very quickly and he could help fine-tune that model to make it even better.
Jason Niedle (04:20)
Very cool. So your title is Senior Director of Global Sales. What do you consider the heart of that role?
Chris May (04:25)
When I first started at Sapien, I always, I’ve been at zero to one growth. This is, the third time now. And I always view myself as super SDR, as the first thing that I do there. You have to get on as many calls as possible.
listen to customers, basically trying to find ICP. And because this industry has changed tremendously, most people that are looking for data labeling and data collection for large language models like ChatGPT, they’re buying this type of service for the very first time. So a big part of my job, is kind of navigating that buying process and really try to drive value.
to what Sapien can offer. Obviously I have four AEs currently under me, three SDRs, so on and so forth. So there’s the traditional pipeline review, I hop on calls, I strategize with them. But it’s more about not just finding ICP, but also relaying what I hear in the field back to product. The go-to-market cycle for product has been shortened significantly because of
just how fast paced this industry is growing, right? So I essentially have to be the ears in the field and relay that back and have product make, quick decisions. But I’m also very involved in that. I think that’s, you know, that sums up what I do pretty well, I guess.
Jason Niedle (05:38)
I think two
things that I hear in there that are really interesting is the listening. And I had a guest a couple of weeks ago that I was really impressed with because he said he went out before he started his company and interviewed 300 people in that field to figure out, and then they went from zero to 7 million in a matter of months, like insane. But he knew his target audience better than anyone. So I love that you’re out there listening and then bringing that data back.
And I also think it’s really interesting when you’re taking a brand new company in kind of a brand new field in many ways that you have to figure out like who is my ideal customer profile, who’s my ICP and what value are they looking for and what value are we delivering and how do I match those?
Chris May (06:19)
Yeah, exactly man. That is honestly the hardest part. When we say Web3, AI, that’s obviously the hottest term now. People get confused. Most large enterprise want to be strong followers. They don’t want to be the first one to buy new technology. So yeah, it’s been challenging navigating that, but it’s also been a lot of fun.
Jason Niedle (06:38)
so what stage would you call Sapien and do you consider yourselves a startup still, post startup where do you consider yourselves?
Chris May (06:45)
Yeah, I think from a funding perspective, we’re pre-Series A, we’re in the process of raising for Series A. I think we’ll get that done in the next couple of weeks, in fact. But from an organizational perspective, I think we’re still looking for product market fit, right? I mean, there’s the standard.
Services, we are at, you know, seven plus figures in ARR, but I think because this industry changes really quickly, in fact, our CEO, Rowan Stone said to me last week in our One on One it’s like with typical startups, right? You have a product.
you realize that it doesn’t work in the market and you have another product and it doesn’t work in the market and maybe the third or the fourth one ended up being massive hits. So I think we’re in the, hey, we tried this, it didn’t really work. We did get some customers, but the market is shifting this way. Let’s try this out. And we’re still iterating with the final product UI backend it’ll look like, but it’s good that we have paying customers to help us along the way.
Jason Niedle (07:40)
I mean, that’s huge. So many people come in and they’re figuring out some of those things and there’s no funding whatsoever, right? And there’s no funding and there’s no ARR of very little. So with that said, then as you’re figuring this all out, you’re kind of, what do they say, building the wings as you fly, right? What’s your growth goal over the next 12 months?
Chris May (07:57)
Yep.
think we have, we’re looking to 5X revenue this year. And I think that’s doable and also have more clarity on product market fit. I think we have a thesis, we think that large enterprises around the world,
having trouble collecting data. That is the biggest request we’ve been getting from basically all the Fortune 100 is that, hey, we need some type of real world data, ground truth data being collected around the world and our platform can solve it, right? But on the back end, there’s a lot of things like QA, a lot of,
platform issues that we have to solve if a large volume request comes in. I think in the short term, it’s the better, you know, get some real clarity on product market fit and let’s go all in.
Jason Niedle (08:45)
And so 5X is a big goal. What are you doing in marketing and sales to make that happen?
Chris May (08:49)
Yeah, that’s a very good question.
It’s funny how when I first started in sales, was like the boom of the SaaS sales tools era, right? Like it’s very streamlined of the Zoom in, you get your info from Zoom info, you draft your message in SalesLoft and whatever and then it sends and then you, I don’t think that works anymore, right? It’s funny how I’ve used all of these different types of tools throughout the years, but I finally came back to realizing that cold calling, right…
the number one way for us to get leads and also trade shows, right? I think we’ve come to an age where like, I think that human connection, I think people really miss that. And that has been, the biggest hit for us is to, you know, I have all my, you SDRs calling now. And I think there’s going to be some type of growth there, but it’s not going to be as quickly as, if we do SEO and marketing really, really well.
part we’re still trying to figure out. It’s a very, very crowded space. When I first started in this field, I think there was 20 companies in the world doing this. Now there’s about 600, if not more. And so it’s a very crowded competitive space. And so we’re still trying to find that messaging, right? We’re still trying to put out content that resonates with the world. That’s still what we’re trying to solve.
But I think our sales teams really go back to, it’s also a very, our buyers are very niche. So we can target them very specifically with specific titles. And then we have SDRs calling and I think they’re doing a great job. And yeah, so some organic growth, but right now we’re like 80% outbound versus 20% inbound. A company like ours should really be the other way around, but we’re definitely working towards that.
Jason Niedle (10:28)
That’s cool. So in your business specifically then, if you could wave some sort of magic wand and change something, in other words, if you could remove a constraint to sales or sales challenges, was there something you would fix, adjust, make better?
Chris May (10:42)
I think we’ve really honed in the messaging. Everybody who actively has a project or working on the problem really likes our messaging, but we’ve just been spending a lot of time. I think the dial success rate is still very, very low. And it’s just, for me, it’s still, there’s so many tools out there, right? That says that they could get, know, they could find you the right person, the ICP. It’s just very noisy out there. I wish I had.
tool out there that could just, with Chat GPT, could just list out everybody that is relevant in the industry. And because we have such good messaging, think the connection rate would be really, really high. So yeah, that’s the, know, that for me is just penetration, I guess.
Jason Niedle (11:18)
Like if you could if you connect better with the ICPS or find them more easily.
Chris May (11:23)
Right, for sure.
Jason Niedle (11:25)
So What’s really working well in sales and marketing? said, like, is there anything that surprises you? You said trade shows and cold calls. Is there anything else where you’re like, wow, that used to work really well and it’s not? anything interesting?
Chris May (11:37)
I think, you know, if you go on LinkedIn right now, there’s a bunch of different sales leaders telling you how to run a playbook, do the Sandler pain funnel MEDIC, or whatever that is.
What I start to realize is that those types of metrics gives you a really good foundation on how to be a good salesperson. But the end of the day for me, what I’ve been realizing is that there really is no one perfect sales methodology, especially in AI because this industry changes so quickly. And it’s really about active listening for me. And what our close rate is at 75%, which is really high, is because my message to my team is always just be super
super customizable on those calls. We have a deck, but if you don’t have to use it, then great. for me, it’s really about every company that talks to us is building some type of revolutionary AI product that they think is going to to change the world. So how do we feed into that? How do we become a consultant to go on that journey with them? I think has resonated really well with
and we’re in this journey together to figure out how to build the next Chat GPT or DeepSeek.
I like to say I like to hire missionaries, not mercenaries, right? Early hires should care about the mission and be obsessed with learning because it’s such a new field. You know, I think experience matters, but I think, you know, curiosity and grit to me matters more. And I think that embodies my sales team pretty well.
Jason Niedle (13:00)
You were talking about active listening and not using the deck and being flexible. I had one of my guests say to me that he really asks basically one question when he jumps on a call and it’s, for you, what’s the best use of this half hour? What do you need? And I’m like, I love that because then I’m literally, they’re just telling me what they want and then I just give it to them. And it was such a…
You know, it’s an easy question, but it’s a great thing. What’s our best use of this time? Right? What can I help you with?
Chris May (13:25)
Yeah,
that’s fantastic. Yeah, I might use that. That’s really good.
Jason Niedle (13:29)
Yeah.
So do you have any favorite lead gen at the moment? Is there something out there that’s like exceptional?
Chris May (13:36)
We use a tool called Ample Market that I think is pretty good. I think it’s called Ample Market. think it’s a pretty good tool. There’s so many tools out there now. I know a bunch of my old sales leaders.
Jason Niedle (13:39)
What was it again?
Chris May (13:47)
you know, they’re starting their own thing and they’re all doing some type of AI agent merge together, you know, type sales tool to give you like a one-stop shop, automatically populate messages and things like that. you know, I think for me the tooling is what it is, right? It’s still about once you get on the phone, once you get a LinkedIn response, how does that messaging come to cross? I think that’s
still open but yeah, Ample Market is what we use now for for LeadGen prospecting and I think it’s been working for us.
Jason Niedle (14:15)
Cool. So We have a lot of C-level listeners and directors of marketing. What do you wish they knew about growing sales?
Chris May (14:23)
The first thing on my calendar every single day is email a customer. It could be a customer that said no, it could be a current customer, but I have to send one personalized message to a customer every single day. And…
The reason why I mention that is I think at the end of the day, being disciplined is the single most important quality in a salesperson. It’s about repetition, right? It’s about, from an SDR’s perspective, my mindset should be if I don’t get a meeting booked today, I’m not going to, I’m not going to rest until I get one, right? As an AE, there’s a million reasons why a deal don’t close, but you know, pipeline is everything, right? If you work hard, you will have enough pipeline
obviously given that there’s some sort of product market fit. From a leadership perspective, it’s just, am I keeping my AEs? Are they making enough calls? Are they getting enough discovery calls? Are they checking all the boxes when they’re doing their deal follow ups, their joint execution plans and things like that, right? Like, I’m a…
big believer in the best salespeople or the most disciplined salespeople. And it’s not easy, right? It’s not easy making 100 phone calls a day and getting rejected 99 times. It’s not very easy. If you don’t hit your number in two quarters, most likely you get put on a PIP, right? So it’s not very easy to be a salesperson, in this day and age. SaaS sales is uber competitive. But I am a big believer that if you stay disciplined
we win.
Jason Niedle (15:41)
So you talked about how all of Your customers are really transforming the world with AI. And you probably have a really good vantage point when you look at it and you see AI company after AI company after AI company that’s doing something magical right now. What do we need to know about AI, especially as it relates to growing our companies?
Chris May (15:52)
Yeah.
Yeah, I think companies now are super hesitant about investing large amounts of money into projects, right? I think before DeepSeek came out, like the standard rate for building a foundational (AI) model was like a billion dollars, right? And then you have the Walmarts and Targets of the world actually thinking about investing in these types of models. But, know, after DeepSeek came out, we realized that,
and so our stuff can solve a lot of different problems very, very easily. And that could change. Our industry evolves in months, not years. And so what I would say is just always be on the lookout for the newest tools. Do not invest in something that will get you stuck for very, very long time. There are a lot of AI agents out there. And the companies that win
are the ones that are very knowledgeable about what the market’s out there and can be like a system integrator of some sorts of combining all the resources out there. And that’s also what the Sapien thesis is, right? Like whenever a customer come to us with like a labeling or a collection problem, instead of investing in a tool and pay a couple hundred thousand dollars for a labeling tool, we believe that we can build on top of a lot of open source stuff that’s out there that’s already pretty good.
You know, and essentially pass on the savings to the customers. I think that is part of our thesis as well. And I think for execs that are looking into investing in AI, that’s also one of the things that I think they should be looking at is that there’s so many resources out there, so many AI companies that are popping up that’s actually delivering enterprise level value. but they’re just not being seen, you know, for whatever reason.
Jason Niedle (17:32)
Cool. So everything feels pretty turbulent right now, right? As you mentioned, AI is changing every minute, literally. And new technologies come out. it was a billion dollars a few months ago to get a model. now it’s, what was it, Deep Seek $7 million or something like that, like some tiny amount, comparatively speaking. And then on top of that, the world seems to have all sorts of economic turbulence. Yesterday, as we filmed this,
Chris May (17:48)
Exactly,
Jason Niedle (17:55)
the world got hit with a round of tariffs. So what do you see in the road ahead and how are you going to deal with that? How do you keep growing your company in turbulent waters?
Chris May (17:58)
Yeah
Yeah, like I said earlier, we as sales teams are the eyes and ears in the field. And whatever information we get, that has to be relayed to product, to marketing, to senior leadership immediately to be able to navigate the waters. Let me give you an example. We were in the middle of
fundraising and then DeepSeek announced and all of the VC were like, wait, let’s just stop everything and reevaluate how we look at AI companies. So it’s very scary, but I look at it as an opportunity for companies like us to have a new chance to compete with the industry giants, like the scales, the app and the world
space. Whenever there’s a big shift in this industry dynamic, which seems to happen every couple of months now in our space, it really gives us an opportunity because we’re so small to be nimble and reposition ourselves. Traditionally, data labeling is done efficiently with
very large centralized teams. But now we’ve seen all around the globe these labeling centers have been dissolving. And people are looking for a more decentralized way to give input into models, for example. Like how can we get these large language models to eventually an AGI, to an all-knowing AI that’s by…
Jason contributing to how to cook a Spanish omelet, for example, right? Those type of things. And so the market’s definitely moving towards a decentralized, you know.
And you know, we kind of saw this opportunity and we kind of pivoted and kind of shifted our product marketing towards that as well. So it’s not just about closing deals. It’s also about asking these sort of decision makers on, what their product market roadmap looks like, right? And how, like most companies that we talk to are our competitors to OpenAI and DeepSeek, and we’re asking their opinion on, hey, what is your
internal strategy on dealing with this huge existential crisis, right? Like we’re trying to work with OpenAI and Mid Journey, for example, these large, know, gen AI or large, — model companies and, they don’t even know what’s going to to happen in the next quarter, right? They’re like, okay, we can try to build the best models that we can, but realistically, somebody somewhere in the world can come up with something that’s typically cheaper and better. And so, yeah, it’s just about being adaptable.
making sure that the feedback that we give to product marketing teams are very quick because the go-to-market cycle is significantly shortened in our industry for sure.
Jason Niedle (20:30)
So for the road ahead, I can summarize, listen to your customers really well, relay that to the team immediately, and be nimble on how you execute.
Chris May (20:37)
Exactly.
Jason Niedle (20:38)
I love it. This has been super interesting. Where can our audience find you?
Chris May (20:40)
I’m on LinkedIn
You can find us on sapien.io and if anybody goes wants to sort of be on a platform, play the game, just type in game.sapien.io. You can already go online, know, label some data, maybe take a picture or do a translation and earn some crypto, earn some USDC, earn some points, play a game. And if you’re interested in talking to me more about AI, can find me linked in basically at Chris May.
Jason Niedle (21:05)
Sounds really fun. And for you listeners out there, that’s sapien.io or game.sapien.io, which that sounds fun. I’m going to to check that out. And it’s Chris May at Sapien. He’s on LinkedIn. Chris, thank you so much for being on Beyond SaaS. For leaders in mid-stage tech looking to grow, we drop episodes twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And you can find me, Jason Niedle, at tethos.com, where you can also grab our free report on how to grow your tech company. And that’s at tethos.com/podcast. Of course.
Chris May (21:15)
Yeah.
Jason Niedle (21:34)
Drop any questions for me or for future guests and comments. We appreciate that. And don’t forget to share if this gave you some value today. Until next time, this is Beyond SaaS.
