The Intersection of Technology and Human Connection | Tomer Azenkot on BeyondSaaS Ep 013

Jason Niedle Today we’re talking with Tomer Azenkot, CEO of Vee24, about how to build teams that consistently overachieve by delighting prospects and customers.

Welcome to Beyond SaaS, Tomer. Before we jump in, have you got a golden nugget for today?

Tomer Azenkot Thank you, Jason. Yeah, actually I do. In fact, we launched a brand new website and we used a tool called Lovable, which is an AI driven website creation tool. So think Chat GPT style prompt and it builds the website for you. And that enabled us to launch a new website within a few weeks without any external resources, without any technical resources really. Super, super impressive and gets you thinking what’s possible.

and how easy it is.

Jason Niedle That’s actually pretty amazing. It’s gonna put people like me out of business one day unless I keep changing, but I think that’s the nature of the game for all of us,

Tomer Azenkot It is, we have to continue to adapt for sure.

Jason Niedle Absolutely. And how do you spell that? Just like it sounds?

Tomer Azenkot Lovable, I think their website is lovable.dev, but yeah, just the way it sounds.

Jason Niedle Awesome, very cool. Well, let me do some quick introductions. I am Jason Niedle, founder of Tethos. We’re a growth agency. So for over 20 years, we’ve been accelerating tech company growth through strategy, branding, lead gen, and conversion. And today I’m really excited to be joined by you, Tomer. You’re known for your management style based on trust and coaching. You’re the CEO of Vee24, which helps leading brands deliver more human-to-human customer experiences.

powered by video, AI chat, co-browsing, appointment setting and more. And it looks like you focus on luxury home and beauty brands, but really anyone with customer centric team so that they can grow sales and loyalty. And it really seems like, you live by these principles that your reviews were glowing and everyone seems to appreciate your management So welcome.

Tomer Azenkot Thank you. Yeah, I’m excited to talk about all of those things.

Jason Niedle Tell me a little bit about Vee24 and how you see your role there.

Tomer Azenkot I think the best way to think about Vee24 is first of all, we help elevate the customer experience, just like you mentioned, and video is really at the core of what we do. But what I try to challenge our customers and prospects with is when you walk into a store or any type of business, you’re typically greeted with someone with a smile and sometimes you’re offered a drink, know, coffee, maybe a glass of champagne. Yet when you enter the e-commerce store, the website,

There’s typically no one there to greet you and the experience is nowhere near what you have when you’re there in person. And I think our expectations are becoming greater and greater for the e-commerce experiences. And we do want someone to greet us, especially in those cases where there is that need for that human to human connection, like you mentioned before. And we help enable that.

And in some use cases where we focus, so you mentioned luxury, you mentioned home, automotive is another one. It really helps to speak with someone and have your questions answered quickly and get help to do what you want to do.

Jason Niedle it’s almost unheard of these days to show up at a site and actually have an answer that’s not useless. Except through you, I’m sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tomer Azenkot Yeah, I agree.

I mentioned Lovable a couple minutes ago, there’s some great automated tools and AI, but it’s not always the right way to go about things. Sometimes you do want to talk to another person.

Jason Niedle It’s funny that you mention all this because just yesterday I was talking about someone who is a secret shopper and he said he went into one of these, really high end stores at South Coast Plaza. And he said, I’m looking for a watch. And the first person looked him up, go see my associate over here. And the associates just looked down and said, we don’t have it. And he’s like, I’m pretty sure they failed, right? He could have, hey, what was it that you were looking for? Can I get you something? You want to sit down? You want to see the?

Tomer Azenkot Mm.

Jason Niedle bracelets that are similar, like there was a million things they could have done if you’d been doing the right thing, right? So you also have to have the right humans, but 100 % that is not happening on most e-commerce transactions that I think any of us see.

Tomer Azenkot Yeah, I was in New York City last week and I went to visit a few of our customers and a few prospects as well. And many of those meetings happened at the retail locations. And one in particular that I remember vividly is I walked into this very high-end watch store as well. And first of all, someone opens the door, so they have like a security guard that opens the door for you. Immediately I was offered a cup of

coffee. And then when I told them, no, I’m here for a meeting, they told me, okay, why don’t you sit over here? They walked me to a desk where I had a seat. They still brought me some drinks, even though I said I’m good. And it was just an amazing experience. again, the website experience is nothing like that. They expect you to find everything on your own and, you know, click next, next, next, and buy a $50,000 watch. And somehow that does work. Some people do it, but it falls short from a customer experience.

Jason Niedle But

obviously the people that are using your technology or that have figured out how to do this and to replicate that human experience on the web are gonna have a much better response rate, for sure.

Tomer Azenkot Yeah, conversion rates are much better. It’s a little bit tricky to look at conversion because people who want to buy kind of self-select into talking to someone, but average order values are tremendously higher. let’s say you’re buying, online, you want to buy a new sofa, you go to a furniture store that uses our technology, you’ll talk to someone, they’ll show you the sofas in the store. They’ll sit on them while talking to you over video to show you what it’s like.

And then of course they’ll talk to you about coffee tables and the rugs and other accessories. So average order values is much higher because of all the upsell opportunities you have when you’re in a conversation.

Jason Niedle I love that. This is a trend that my last two podcasts guests were talking about is how do we use technology to further more human communication.

Tomer Azenkot That’s interesting. That’s great to hear. I love that.

Jason Niedle Yeah. So what do you see your role as, like, obviously CEO, but like, what’s the core of that role for you?

Tomer Azenkot A lot of different things, I’m doing a lot of basically CFO work. I’m kind of like the money guy. Obviously everything to do with the team. kind of chief HR as well and sales, sales, sales, sales. I would like to focus more of my time on sales if possible, but there is.

In a smaller company, there’s tons of administration and I don’t quite want to hire people to do that because it’s a cost with little value when you’re such a small company. So I don’t love that part of the job, but being in front of customers is a majority of my time and that’s where I want to spend it.

Jason Niedle Cool. So do you see yourself in the startup or mid-stage? What would you classify Vee24?

Tomer Azenkot I’d like to see ourselves as a startup. We’re not a super young company. Originally founded all the way back in 2006, went through a number of pivots and changes. I think in our current form, we can say that we’ve been around since 2013, so more than 10 years. But in terms of our size and how nimble I’d like to think we are and fast pace with everything. So everything from engineering to how we deal with our customers and how we want to be everywhere.

all the time, I see ourselves as a startup for sure.

Jason Niedle So our goal here is really to help other leaders learn about growth. You’ve been around, I mean, almost 20 years in this company, right? And 10 in this iteration. What do you wish other leaders knew about growing a tech company?

Tomer Azenkot Well, I think you have to adapt to what stage you’re in. So I’ve been with Vee24 for just over two years and I joined at a chasm where Vee24 was going through a decline of several years and it was time for a meaningful change. So one of the things we had to do immediately was cut down expenses. This went along with how the macro environment changed quite a bit. So more difficult to raise money over the past two years.

So the kind of immediate action plan was, okay, we need to cut costs and we basically need to question everything that we do.

and don’t let the budget from last year carry over into the next year just because it is. So one of the things I’ve done that it was actually a recommendation from one of our board members and investors is to look at budget on a weekly basis. So both what’s coming in and also what’s going out on a weekly basis. And I have this homegrown spreadsheet that I update almost daily.

It’s a pain on the one hand, but on the other hand, it’s enabled me to totally understand what’s going on in the business. Like literally every dollar that’s coming in or going out. And I now know which customers pay on time, which customers we have to remind a couple of times. I know every single subscription service that we have and it’s made me a much better leader. So that’s a big tip for anyone starting out. That’s the quickest way I think.

to onboard yourself as a new leader.

Jason Niedle Interesting. So what is your growth goal for the next 12 months.

Tomer Azenkot we want to grow at a faster pace. So until now, the growth pace has been modest, I would say. Now we want to bring on new customers. With this new website launch, we’ve done a little bit of

focusing on particular market segments where we think we have a really good opportunity and all of that was kind of focused on where does video add the most value because our technology can be implemented on every single website in the world. It would be very difficult for us to build a strategic plan around that kind of premise. So we thought, okay, where are we adding a lot of value? Well, we add value where you want to see the product on video. We talked about watches before.

before buying a watch, I want to see the watch, obviously. And we also add value where you want to see the person that you’re buying a service or interacting with. So if I’m, for example, speaking with my financial advisor, let’s say I have some documents I need to sign as well in the process, it’s much easier to do so on a video call with co-browsing that enables sharing of assets across. Very difficult to do so on the phone and feels very antiquated.

So we’ve kind of doubled down on where we think we have a great opportunity and now we really want to grow those verticals.

Jason Niedle So sounds like you’ve handled the fundamentals and product and targeting and your messaging. What’s the biggest obstacle to growth this coming year?

Tomer Azenkot think the biggest obstacle and the most frustrating part of selling Vee24 is that not everything that has to do with our implementation is within our control. So we provide the technology and it’s super straightforward. It’s not so expensive. And here’s your JavaScript code, put it on the website. That takes a minute. We do all the rest. Very, very easy.

The hard part and the frustrating part is that our customer needs to figure out a strategy around this. Our customer needs to potentially hire a team that will be on the other side of the calls when their customers call in. So that makes it challenging. We’re looking at different ways to work around that with partnerships and maybe some other technology solutions. But the bottom line is that

The companies that we sell to, have to be all in. They have to be willing to take on a new initiative. They have to be motivated and interested in growing their own businesses. So without that, it just makes it very, very slow and challenging.

Jason Niedle Sounds like there’s a lot of education that needs to be done in some ways.

Tomer Azenkot I think so. we talked about some of those experiences, if you think about websites that you visited over the past couple of years, I can probably bet that none or maybe only one or two had actually video interaction on them. It’s still very, nascent. For some reason, I don’t understand. It’s more common in Western Europe and in the UK than it is in the US.

One of my hypotheses is that maybe we’ve leaned into AI a little bit too much here, more than they have in the old countries, so to speak. There maybe they value more the human-to-human interaction and more patient, maybe, I don’t know. But it’s still early days, I hope. That’s why I joined Vee24 think that maybe 10 years from now it will be all over the place. But I just wish I could…

I could turn that dial and up the playback speed to 5x because right now it’s it’s painfully slow in some cases, even though it seems like a no, the feedback we get is yes, this is a no brainer, let’s do it. But I have 10 other priorities I need to get done this year before we’re ready for it.

Jason Niedle So then how do new people find out about you? How do you fill that top of funnel?

Tomer Azenkot that’s a good and challenging question. I think a lot of what I previously had been very successful at in earlier in my career is, no longer working or relevant. nobody answers their phones. Nobody answers their emails. LinkedIn is really noisy. it’s really tough. One of the things I try to do is get on podcasts like yours, Jason, and try to get the word out there. And hopefully someone sees this and says, Hey,

make sense, let’s talk to Vee24. I think we have an opportunity to do more education like you mentioned before so more education focused content can be created and get out there. And then I think also in-person events have a lot of value. It’s not cheap, it requires travel in most cases, but we try to get out there a few times a year for events as well.

Jason Niedle Mm-hmm.

So is there something that’s working pretty well in that realm in terms of top of funnel?

Tomer Azenkot With this recent new website launch, we’ve seen a couple of inbound leads come in over the past couple of weeks. looking into where they came from, came organically, kind of search, which is interesting. But it does give us some feedback that the website is working. So there was that conversion there.

But I think we do have to measure it and we do have to be more aggressive out there for sure.

Jason Niedle From my perspective, always like to look at it, as how many of right people am I filling in the top of the funnel? And then how am I reducing friction on that path from top of funnel to, you know, sale? And I’m 99 % sure your new website will radically reduce that rate of friction there, right? I’m sure that your technology on your website, I didn’t test it when I went there, will reduce that friction, right? Like if I had gone there with some interest and I’d started chatting and…

somebody, a real human actually popped up. mean, that has to be amazing for people who come to the site.

Tomer Azenkot Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. So the new website, one of the big tenets when we were building it was to make it a lot more simple than the previous one. So it kind of looks like a landing page, the homepage, right? It’s very short. It’s got a spot where you can enter your email address to get some content that we created. The idea is exactly what you said, to remove the barriers and get people to engage.

Jason Niedle Cool. Every single person brought up AI that I’ve spoken with so far and it wasn’t one of my questions. So I finally decided I should just add the AI question in there. What should tech leaders know about AI these days or what do you wish other people knew about AI and how that’s going to affect our growth ahead?

Tomer Azenkot I think maybe Scott Galloway said that, impacts of new technology is overestimated in the short term, but underestimated in the long term. And I think that’s definitely true for AI. we’re not, it’s not going to change our lives this year. Maybe some very particular use cases like building a new website using Lovable totally changed.

But as a whole, it’s not changing our lives yet. But I think 10 years from now or 20 years from now, our lives will be very different than what we can imagine.

when we’re asked about AI, so we have some AI in our product, but I don’t really focus on it. guess like you and the podcast questions, it’s a means. So I think we try to focus on what the benefit is and it doesn’t matter. The exact technology is less important in my view. And I find it very annoying when people have this mandate of like, we have to buy some AI technology this year. I think that’s ridiculous personally.

But

Jason Niedle It

seems like it’s everywhere right now too, right?

Tomer Azenkot Yeah, yeah, but you know, we’ll play and do that as well if necessary, I guess.

Jason Niedle But in relation to what you’re saying, it’s interesting because when photography came around, all the painters were screaming that, now you’re going to put all the painters out of business. And ultimately, painting became more valuable because it was hand-done, handmade, real, an interpretation of the thing. And I wonder if that’s exactly what’s going to happen with you. All this AI stuff is going to be there. And 90 % of the sites I go to are going to have some AI bot. And I’m going to start getting pretty irritated with that in some short term.

And then I’m going to go to some luxury brand and there’s going to be a real human talking to me there and I’m sold instantly right because that’s the coolest thing

Tomer Azenkot Yeah, I think there is some validity to that. We do the chat as well. So we do the AI, generative AI-based chat bot as well, but it’s not special, so I don’t even talk about it because there’s a thousand other companies that do it. And it’s pretty commoditized by now. I think what’s not commoditized is the right implementation, right? Like how to figure out the secret sauce is how do I build it into

Jason Niedle Hmm.

Tomer Azenkot an experience that makes it really compelling to the customer. And that’s where the smarts are, and that’s not so much the technology, that’s more the strategy behind it.

Jason Niedle Yeah, and again, it seems to get back to this idea of like technology serving the human to human connection rather than technology for technology’s sake. Super interesting. So you said you’re running a lean and mean team. How do you decide when you’re going to bring something in house or when you’re going to outsource it? And how do you find great people on either side of that deal?

Tomer Azenkot Yeah, absolutely.

That’s a good question. We’ve done both and we’re going to continue to do both. Obviously advantages to both outsourcing and hiring internally. At our stage today, I really like the outsourcing options because it allows us just to be more nimble. We can shift the strategy very quickly. Hiring is also incredibly difficult for smaller companies.

I think to some extent it’s very similar to the challenges of lead generation where there’s just so much noise out there and recruiters I think, or recruiting in general, there’s a lot of junk out there today, much more than there was when we were earlier in our careers. So I think outsourcing is great. think bringing a specialist for their particular specialty is really good.

The biggest challenge with outsourcing is that we still want to maintain a team that enjoys working together. Especially now we’re almost completely remote as a company. We’re remote in the US. We have an office in the UK. So we’re, you know, it’s not easy to keep that, you know, the team environment. We try to get, all get together maybe once a quarter or so.

probably more than once every six months. in many cases, we bring in as many of the outsourced folks as we can. So that’s my perspective.

We’re trying to lean more on partnerships and channels. So rather than growing our team, if I can have a couple people who are really good at building channel relationships and have the channels do the sales for us, in my view, that would be the best, the Nirvana maybe.

Jason Niedle I had someone asking the other day about mechanisms for referral-based marketing. Do you guys use any referral-based marketing and do you have some way to facilitate that?

Tomer Azenkot Over the past two years, probably a dozen or so people who have made introductions for us in exchange for some sort of commission for the deals that eventually closed. I don’t know if you’d classify that as referral marketing or not, but our deals are enterprise deals, larger organizations typically. it’s…

long conversations that could take long sales cycles that could take more than a year unless there was an immediate project on hand, which is typically not the case because it’s not top of mind for people. We have to first go through that education process and create the opportunity for us.

Jason Niedle Yeah, it’s interesting. makes me think like what line in the budget almost are you targeting that’s already there and already existing? Because they’re not generally saying, you know what I have to do this year? I have to upgrade my experience in the corner of my website, you know? That’s not usually what they’re saying right off, right?

Tomer Azenkot It’s not, yeah. So there is a kind of tangential space for customer service, which is a relatively large, in terms of software providers, there are many companies, you big ones like Zendesk and Salesforce obviously do that as well. So you do have kind of a customer service category. We focus more on the sales side, but we integrate with the customer service tools so that the experience is seamless when you have a…

support or service question, get routed into a customer service person. Also in some organizations, especially the larger ones, we’re kind of bucketed into the contact center. They do have dedicated budgets and I think in a forward looking organization, we’re actually, we’re in the process of launching a number of automotive brands in this big conglomerate in the Middle East.

So we went live with Honda, UAE, and we’re about to go live with Saudi Arabia and a couple more automotive brands. And they’re very forward looking. They took, as soon as they decided they’re going forward with the Vee24, they took the phone number and the email addresses off of their website, know, anywhere that there was a phone number or email address mentioned. The only way to communicate with them is through our tool. And that can be, you can fill out a callback form.

So someone can call you back if you don’t want to chat online or you can use asynchronous messaging using SMS or WhatsApp or even Facebook Messenger. But there’s no more 800 number to call. There’s no more email to email address to email. So previously there was a contact center. They have budgets. They canceled all the tools that they were using for their IVR and all the phone systems and moved everything to digital.

Jason Niedle That’s amazing, so everything can route through your system.

Tomer Azenkot Yes, and this way they have total control of the history of the interactions, regardless of the channel, and they have really great analytics as to those interactions and feeding all the way through the CRM to the point of sale when the person comes into the auto dealership to actually test drive and purchase.

Jason Niedle That’s so cool for them because then they can look and see, look, most of our sales actually did this first before they came to us versus everybody else who just kind of throws up their hands and has no idea. It’s like, it’s very hard to trace your route sometimes back through that. You know, how are they reaching us? How are they contacting us? Where do they come from? And now you’re giving them some visibility there.

Tomer Azenkot Yeah.

Yeah, and I think in automotive in the US, it’s a very antiquated market. Here also, the OEMs or the brands are very separate from the dealerships. In other parts of the world, it’s the same company that kind of manages both. They’re both the importer and the dealer. So it’s a little bit easier for them. But they have campaigns all the time. And I think the attribution to their campaigns must be really challenging because

I just got an email today for my personal car saying, you can trade in for this much from the dealership. If I do go there, there’s no way they will know that that’s a result of the email that I received today. Once it’s all digital, it’s much easier to track and attribute.

Jason Niedle Yeah, absolutely. So what would you want to tell early stage CEOs? What’s some advice that you have for people just jumping into this journey?

Tomer Azenkot I had two interesting learnings, given that this is my first CEO role. I was previously leading sales teams. Number one, this took me about, I was about a year late in doing this. And the next time I will do this on day one, bring in with you at least one or two people that you’ve worked with in the past and will be your partners in onboarding and.

figuring out what needs to be done. It’s very difficult to be on your own. It’s very difficult to be the only new person in the company on your own as someone who’s been brought in as a change agent, especially. So I brought in three people that I’ve worked with in the past, two outsourced, one as a hire. And unfortunately, I did it about a year after I started. I should have done it on day one. And then the second thing which I mentioned before is everything to do with budgeting.

Don’t take anything for as a given and really get into the details. Even if you have a health standing CFO, you should understand every single line item. And the best way to do that is to be, you know, roll your sleeves up and get your hands dirty with all the spreadsheets and quick books and whatever tools are being used. But once you truly understand the dollars coming in, the dollars going out.

you have a much better understanding of the business.

Jason Niedle So know your numbers down to the line item and don’t go it alone.

Tomer Azenkot Yeah, those are my two things.

Jason Niedle Awesome. So times feel pretty chaotic these days. What growth trends do you see in the year ahead or opportunities?

Tomer Azenkot Yeah, I think you can’t overstate the fact that things are turbulent, especially in the past couple of weeks. I don’t know when this will be published, but we’re coming off the stock market went up and down one or 2 % every single day last week.

Jason Niedle We’re talking in mid-March and this will probably hit in early April 2025.

Tomer Azenkot Yeah, think focusing on what the business is good at, doubling down, not trying to do everything is always good advice. Where will we be a year from now? I think if all your fundamentals as a business are good, I think you’ll be fine no matter what. I’m very hopeful that the venture capital space is gonna…

wake up after what two and a half years of quiet, but I’m not entirely optimistic that that’s going to happen within 12 months. I think maybe another year or two before we really see that come back to life.

Jason Niedle I worry about that too. used to have most of our companies come from VCs and they would be for us company after company after company and then like two years ago they just disappeared.

Tomer Azenkot Yeah, my best guess, and I hope I’m wrong, but my best guess is that we still have another year or two before things, I don’t know they’ll be back to where they were two years ago, but I don’t see the light in the end of the tunnel at the moment, at least from my perspective.

Jason Niedle Ouch. I’ve heard this recurring trend through these conversations of like stick to the fundamentals. And I guess I’ll make this my last question. What would you see as those business fundamentals that we all need to be looking at, myself and tech companies in general?

Tomer Azenkot I think most important is to stick to what you’re good at and not try to be something that you’re not. I’ve experienced this throughout my career. It’s very easy. As a salesperson, you see an opportunity to sell something additional when you know inside that that’s not really what you should be doing. So I think it’s important to skip that and just stick to your strategy and don’t get…

don’t have shiny object syndrome or whatever you want to call it. And I think everything else, if you follow that type of strategy, then everything else kind of sorts itself out.

Jason Niedle Cool, that’s awesome. So this has been super interesting and informative. Where can our audience find you?

Tomer Azenkot So Vee24.com, V-E-E-2-4.com. I’m always happy to connect with people on LinkedIn as well. So you can just search me on LinkedIn, pretty easy to find.

Jason Niedle Cool, Vee24.com. Vee24.com. Tomer, thank you for being on Beyond SaaS For listeners who are leaders in mid-stage tech looking to grow, I do offer a limited number of growth consultations. You can find me at tethos.com. And of course, please drop any questions or comments or feedback. And don’t forget to share with a friend if you’ve got some value out of today’s episode. Until next time, this is Beyond SaaS