SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

EP 523: xIQ Using AI to Power Sales Teams with $1.1m Raised with CEO Usman Sheikh

29 Dec 2016

Audio

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Usman Sheikh, CEO and founder of xIQ – an award-winning platform for personalized sales, marketing intelligence, and content marketing. He's the former vice president of SAP AG and he's pushing digital frontiers by delivering consumer grade experiences in B2B sales and the marketing space. xIQ is the winner of the prestigious 2016 Content Marketing Institute Award for best integration of mobile and content marketing. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Zero to One What CEO do you follow? – Bill McDermott Favorite online tool? — Twitter and LinkedIn Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— No If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Take risks as early as you can. Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:49 – Nathan introduces Usman to the show 02:30 – xIQ is a next generation sales intelligence tool designed for B2B sales and marketing professionals 03:04 – Usman worked with the top leaders of the world in SAP 03:30 – xIQ extracts the most relevant content from the most reliable sources 04:00 – xIQ is a SaaS product 04:16 – xIQ was founded in 2014, and released in early 2016 04:44 – xIQ raised 2 rounds of seed round 05:08 – Total amount raised 05:37 – Team size is under 15 and is based in Silicon Valley 06:05 – xIQ has 10 corporate customers and thousands of individual customers 06:35 – Average pay of corporate customers 06:57 – Average MRR 07:24 – Usman discusses one of their clients, GenPact, and how they use xIQ 07:42 – First, xIQ is used as a marketing intelligence tool to track competitors 08:47 – All data is real-time 09:20 – xIQ uses Apache Solr technology to index and for natural language processing 09:50 – xIQ gets their corporate customers from organic traffic 10:32 – xIQ's process is the reason why corporate customers end up buying from them 11:12 – List size 11:24 – xIQ has 1 inside sales person 12:29 – No cancellations/churn yet for xIQ 12:53 – CAC 14:10 – LTV to CAC ratio 15:10 – Connect with Usman through LinkedIn, email and website 16:50 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Experience is a great teacher—continue to learn and hone your skill set. Building a business takes time and there is always room for improvement. Take risks as early on in life as you can. Resources Mentioned: Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Drip – Nathan uses Drip's email automation platform and visual campaign builder to build his sales funnel Toptal – Nathan found his development team using Toptal for his new business Send Later. He was able to keep 100% equity and didn't have to hire a co-founder due to the quality of Toptal Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible. Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books. The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens and follow-up with email sequences LinkedIn – Usman's LinkedIn account [email protected] – Usman's email address xIQ.ai – Usman's business website Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

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