Anshul Gupta on AI and tryin' to triage

Adam Sockel (00:03.235)
You're listening to Bold Calling, a podcast presented by Orem where every episode we're bringing on the biggest and brightest minds in the tech and sales industries for discussion about their biggest challenges and the unique ways they're working to solve them. I'm your host, Adam Sokol, and I am honored to be joined for our first episode by Anjul Gupta, co -founder of Actively .ai. Anjul, thank you so much for joining me today.

Anshul Gupta (00:26.735)
Thanks for having me, Adam. A lot of pressure being the first episode for Bold Calling.

Adam Sockel (00:30.819)
Yeah, we are really really excited. I was saying before we started recording you and I have had a chance to speak a few times now about AI and sales development and so I'm really really excited about this discussion for people who are listening in we're gonna break this up into three different segments. We're gonna first talk about Anshul's company and what they do and where they came from. The second segment is gonna be all about what keeps him up at night and kind of stresses him out and then the third segment we're gonna have a little bit of fun. So first things first, let's...

Let's dive right in. Can you give our listeners an introduction to actively .ai?

Anshul Gupta (01:05.902)
Sure. Maybe before that, I can just quick background myself. I'm actually one of the co -founders of Actively, as you mentioned. My background is actually not in sales, but sort of in math and computer science. Both me and my co -founder have been involved in AI research since our days at Stanford. We've been kind of in the space and studying and playing around with our tooling since GPT -1. And it's been really cool to see even in the last five, six years how rapid the progression and the use cases.

have come since GPT -1 where the models were just only trained on unpublished books, not everything on the web, answering all the different questions that sales reps have never asked them for. And so in terms of actively AI, what we are is an AI agent that helps outbound teams increase pipe gen by doing three things. We tell sales reps who to target, when to reach out, and what to say. And the problem that we see across every company today is that prospectors, whether SDRs or AEs,

They're wasting almost 15, 20 hours a week figuring out, as I mentioned, which account should I be focusing on today? Who are the best people there? Are they still at the company? Have any new ones joined? Were there any prior interactions or conversations with those folks? And ultimately developing a point of view on that account and then crafting that first personalized email. Our technology is automating all of this because machines are just way better at these tasks. What humans are better at are hyper -personalized, you know, LinkedIn or video outreach.

cold calling as Orem is best in class at supporting and ultimately just communicating with prospects. And so we're working with, we're blessed to be working with some of the fastest growing companies and share many customers with you all like Ramp, Bercata, Flowcast, right? And they're seeing a 25, 30 % lift in productivity. And as a small plug, we're a really nice one, two punch with you all at Orem and kind of the broader auto parallel dialing market because our AI is able to kind of help you with preparing those lists.

and draft those hyper relevant emails so that you can spend as much of your day trying to talk to as many prospects as possible.

Adam Sockel (03:11.715)
I love it. And I want to take like one step back. I'm really, first off, like having had several conversations with you and understanding what your platform does, it does make all the sense in the world. You know, we here at Aurum, we're currently at time of recording this, by the time people hear it, we will be just about ready to release this AI report that I've been tirelessly working on for a few months now. And that one of the things we've discovered is exactly what you said is sales reps spend 15, 20, 25 hours on...

like pre -call research and then all the follow -up and it's so time consuming. It takes away their ability to actively sell. There was a Salesforce report last year that said sellers spend 27 % of their time actually selling. So giving them all that time back to be much more active in, like you said, the things that humans are good at of communicating, building relationships, like that is so pivotal. But I want to ask what led you guys down that path to wanting...

to focus on this, like you said, you don't have a, you don't originally come from a sales background and from a sales standpoint, AI can feel very new for a lot of the people, but it's really not. It's been around for a while now, but what, what led you and your co -founders to say like, okay, we have all this information and all this knowledge and experience with AI and we can see that it's growing and where we think it's going to grow is in the sales space. What, what led you down that path?

Anshul Gupta (04:19.936)
Not yet.

Anshul Gupta (04:37.966)
It's a really good question. So the direct answer is, you know, we were like, you know, when we were starting the company, like, what are the best applications of, of kind of AI, just, we weren't really broad. We kind of worked with sports teams, hedge funds, you name it. And, you know, in college, I was, I am, and wasn't nerd. And so I was on the college debate team and my debate partner as a freshman, he was a senior, ended up going on to become a demand generation director and leading kind of like an automated outbound team at, at Burkina, which is, you know, once again, one of our mutual.

Adam Sockel (04:56.962)
Mm -hmm.

Anshul Gupta (05:07.055)
customers and so that was our first four -day exposure to these, you know, mentioned they were facing this problem in terms of every single day, which accounts, which context to focus on. But to your point, Adam, you mentioned AI is kind of not a new paradigm. And so I like to think about kind of the domain we're working with as a good analogy or what a good analogy would be is financial market. So that's a big hobby, like intellectual interest of mine for a long time. And there's so many kind of things in common. So A, there's tons of data, right?

It's generated daily from a variety of sources. Orem is helping you generate a lot of data, Gong, Outreach, all the activities that you're doing, signals you're buying. And then both in sales and the financial markets, because the stakes are so high and any improvements in models or decisions means more money, more pipeline, more dollars, everybody's looking for an edge. Everybody's looking for alpha. Right? And so that means it's really fast moving. There's a lot of sharp minds in it and it's really incentive aligned. And then the last thing, and you probably see this all the time on LinkedIn is,

And anytime people find novel ideas or techniques that work really well in our kind of performing role, they become commoditized really, really quickly. And then it actually has the reverse effect of, you know, in finance, they call arbitrage in a way kind of your edge or your alpha because of that herd mentality wherever it falls. And so it's this really fast moving dynamic space that's similar to kind of other markets or other other practices. And that has the benefit of a lot of data and a lot of unstructured data. So that's why, you know, we were really, really excited about.

the problem space here.

Adam Sockel (06:34.756)
Yeah, I am, you mentioned being a nerd. One of the things that I am nerdy in is sports and thinking about analytics. Like I so desperately am fighting the urge to go down a tangent with you about like the analytics of baseball and basketball and like people understanding now that like three pointers are inherently more valuable than two pointers. And so now teams are shooting like 40 and 50 of them a game. And like from baseball standpoint, like launch angle and people being like, we'll sacrifice trick outs because home runs are more valuable. And as soon as everyone starts doing that.

Anshul Gupta (06:52.397)
Yeah.

Adam Sockel (07:01.924)
It is finding those little edges. And it is really interesting to me when you think about the sales space, like you said, as soon as something comes out that feels like it's revolutionary and very much is, once everyone uses it, it kind of stops being revolutionary. And I guess for you guys, and this may kind of get into slightly into our second segment in a little bit, but from a understanding and AI standpoint, the way with which...

the speed with which everything moves, how do you guys think about staying ahead, continuing to be able to provide that edge to the organizations you're working with?

Anshul Gupta (07:39.503)
It's a great question. And, you know, it often comes up in conversations. I love using this example because I think it shows how quickly the edge gets eliminated. So, you know, a big topic right now in the sales space is sort of AI email personalization, right? And one of the kind of innovations that people have been working on is using different tools that can help you like personalize the first line at scale and send it out.

Right. And in the first couple of times, like I would get an email saying, Hey, I'm sure I saw you grew up in Atlanta. I saw you live in NYC. I saw you went to Stanford or Adam. Hey, I saw you live in Cleveland. How about the Cavaliers? And the first couple of times actually replied to all those emails. Cause I was like, Oh wow. Someone took their time to do the research for me. But now, you know, I tell prospects, I'm like, go or some of our customers like just go to your spam search, which university you went to. Right. And you're going to, you're going to see so many different emails and people say, Oh my God, congrats on, you know, did you ever visit this restaurant near XYZ campus?

And so that's sort of the kind of example I like giving because the first couple of times it's dope and now it's just laziness at scale, right? Effectively being applied. And so to the heart of your question, it's like, where is there like, where's your opportunity or how do you think about it? Backing out, like I think the opportunity to me, of course, the technology shift, like I'm not going to tell you anything new about how cool, you know, GPT, AI, all those developments are.

But I think the really cool thing that you and I and some of your colleagues have talked about is the mindset shift that's actually happening. Right? And so right now we're so used to like really awesome sophistication using consumer apps or in our personal lives, right? We're like our TikTok, Instagram feeds are hyper optimized. We're getting crazy relevant ad recommendations. You can have AI agents that are like booking restaurant reservations or plane tickets for you, right? But there's always been a lag in Delta in sophistication in the enterprise world.

Right? Easy example, compare like the load times of like your Instagram reels to a Salesforce report, right? There's a huge difference in wait times there, right? And so the really cool shift right now is that people are now applying the same expectations to the business world where they're looking really closely at where there's room for crazy efficiency games. So some of our mutual customers, I know you, you know, the Orem team has heard this in conversations. They're actually sitting down and sitting with their reps for the whole week.

Anshul Gupta (10:01.231)
multiple weeks and doing a tear down, entire tear down process of where SDRs and account executives day to day, hour by hour are spending their time, which parts can be automated. And so the result of this exercise is like, you're able to get a really clear list about what are the biggest pain points. And that allows you to stay away from the fads because it's, you've done the analysis of where is the time being spent. And so that's kind of what gives us confidence. I know that was a long, long answer to your question.

Adam Sockel (10:30.435)
No, I love that answer. And to your point, people who are familiar with Orem are probably familiar with one of our kind of founding sellers, Terry Hussein. He talks about business mapping, which is exactly what you're talking about. And he literally says, he's like, I guarantee you, he was on a podcast recently with someone, he's like, I guarantee you, your organization, 99 % of you have not done this, because you're right, it is, I'm really proud of the customer success and the accountants that we have here, because they do sit down with our customers and do this business mapping, because it does.

take a long time. Like I've been on customer visits where we spent multiple days just sitting with reps and it can feel a bit awkward. You're like sitting over their shoulder being like, okay, and now what are you doing? But it is so valuable because once you understand like, oh good Lord, our team is spending 18 hours each every week building out call task reports. Maybe we just need to bring an ops person and who can take care of all of that, or we need to find a way to automate it. Yeah, it's a...

Anshul Gupta (11:09.71)
Exactly.

Anshul Gupta (11:26.798)
Exactly.

Adam Sockel (11:29.315)
It is so important and once you have that ability, once you have that information, you can then take it and actually do something with it. And it kind of gets me to, you are all at your organization, you're very good at taking all of this information and using AI to actively do something with it, which I really, really love. And so I kind of want to shift into that second segment we were discussing. It's like understanding that you are helping organizations.

do things much quicker and inherently like, the first time I saw what you guys do it clicked, like it wasn't, I didn't need someone to describe it to me, I was like, oh good Lord, this is exactly what people need. But thinking through that, what is the kind of thing that keeps you up at night? What is stressing you out from a job standpoint that you're actively working to address?

Anshul Gupta (12:19.471)
Yeah, it's a really good question. I guess from a non -job standpoint, it's the NBA playoffs that are keeping me up at night. My Hawks are unfortunately out of the race, but the Cavs still look like they have some fight. But on the job side, I really think it's less kind of fear or stress. It's more excitement in kind of...

Adam Sockel (12:26.339)
Yeah, we can talk about that after if you would like.

Anshul Gupta (12:46.063)
determining where you want to spend sort of cycles and effort on, right? And so going back to that mind shift thing, the thing that's really exciting to me is that, you know, coming out of the tear down process and like the fact that, as you just mentioned, our software can do a lot of, can eat into the workflow layer and kind of do actions on behalf of teams, both like co -pilot or autopilot. I think the really interesting paradigm shift is that companies are now starting to evaluate like software and technology.

in headcount costs in the same pool rather than in disparate pools. And so in the past, right, like if you only had a $200 ,000 tech budget, a $50 ,000 or $20 ,000 purchase is going to be heavily, heavily, heavily scrutinized, right? But if now technology is the ability to kind of produce crazy efficiency games, like, you know, with Oram, you can 5X the number of dials you were able to able to do before, right? And you can now kind of do with a fewer number of people, the same work output of multiple folks. The paradigm shift is now such that,

It's not about, it's just about what are the total number of kind of costs that you have and what is the, what are the pipeline goals that you have to drive? And it's less of like, okay, well, we can only allocate this much here and this much there. And so I think that that paradigm shift is actually really exciting, but then kind of the question that you ask is, okay, well, with all of this shift in sort of dynamism going on, how do you fit in alongside that picture? And the big challenge that we.

always are kind of thinking about is, well, what problem do Orem and actively help solve? We help increase outbound, mostly outbound, right? Pipeline generation, drive that more consistently and increase that. But that's an evergreen challenge, right? Because there's so many different ways that you can tackle it. You guys are tackling it one way, we're tackling it in a complimentary way, you know? But there's also all these other ways that you can go at that, whether it's investing in third party signals, making your models better, automation, you name it. And so,

Adam Sockel (14:27.746)
Mm -hmm.

Anshul Gupta (14:42.542)
I think that's the big question, which is where do you spend kind of additional time when you have an evergreen sort of challenge that you're working on solving. And it really comes back to what we talked about earlier, which is staying really close to the customer and the users and doing that kind of business mapping to understand what are the problems today and how are they going to evolve when your technology inevitably makes an effect.

right, or the dynamics of the market change. And so that's the big one for me. I'm sure it's probably a similar one for Orem too.

Adam Sockel (15:21.762)
Yeah, it's really interesting. So my, because it's the first episode, I can kind of expand a little bit on my own background because people won't have known it yet. I, I've been in content marketing for 15 years and one of my first CEOs.

came from a PR standpoint and he would always talk to me when we were building out a piece of content, you talk about triage. He'd be like, yeah, it's like, you know, I'm, I'm doing for people who are listening to the podcast, I'm making like the reverse triangle. And he's always like, you, the very top of the funnel, give me the most important information and then like narrow it down because realistically people are going to stop paying attention. And in theory that works. It's triage understanding what's most important to people. Um, but to kind of what you're, what you're saying and like,

Same thing, it's true I think in like any aspect of the role. Like for me, creating content for them, I'm one of the only people who do that. So in theory, I'm like, okay, let's focus on the most important things, but the most important things change so quickly in this space. And if every, it's like the old fight club thing, like if everyone is special, no one is, it's like, if everything's the most important thing, what is actually? So for you, how are you guys thinking about...

Anshul Gupta (16:21.071)
Yeah. What is, yeah.

Adam Sockel (16:28.29)
triaging like what is the most important thing you can tackle you mentioned business mapping with with organizations like How do you in a day in and day out basis address like okay? This is the actual most important thing that I need to be spending my time on you

Anshul Gupta (16:41.359)
It's a good question. I don't necessarily think we do the best job. We have a blessing and curse of basically having what I would humbly say is a pretty OP engineering team. So we can basically build anything, say for maybe AGI, we probably need some more dollars and more resources to build that out. But I think it's definitely a challenge. Our approach has been partner up with companies that are living in the future, right?

companies that are growing, the fastest growing companies that want to grow even faster, but not in the scenario of just throwing a bunch of dollars and humans at the problem. But in terms of being, if they need to do that, they will do it, right? But being really smart, efficient and targeted about it. And that's kind of the big paradigm that like we've seen, you know, taking inspiration from other kind of iconic B2B companies is work with customers or prospects, clients that are living in the future and figure out like ultimately how...

Adam Sockel (17:22.178)
Mm -hmm.

Anshul Gupta (17:39.054)
what their viewpoint is, how that aligns with yours, how you can shape it, and then the rest of the market will follow. As you know, there's like the classic innovation adoption curve. And so companies like Ramp that we're working with, like Furqata that we're working with, they're of course, you know, trying to optimize a unit of their SDRs times or their AEs times as much as they can, but then they're also investing at the same time in like automated outbound or tools that or software or technologies that can kind of...

really operate in headless fashions at scale. And so because they're so, they have the blessing of doing hundreds of millions of revenue and they have a lot of resources, they can invest in those kinds of approaches. And so how do you bring that to the broader market? And so that's the, there's no like, okay, this problem is like the one that, or this specific aspect of the 40 hours a week is what we wanna automate. We wanna be pretty kind of broadly open -minded, but -

just really making sure that we're spending as much time as possible with these companies that are living in the future.

Adam Sockel (18:42.498)
Yeah. And I think the way that you would address that makes so much sense because you're right. It's people, you know, organizations are realizing now that doubling your pipeline, doubling your revenue doesn't just, doesn't just mean double the people that you have. It's understanding what are the ways to automate the things that are taking forever and optimize the ability of your sales reps. Well, and I think the absolute best organizations that are doing this aren't just like,

optimizing their sales reps capabilities because I think what people a lot of time think about is, oh, I can 5x the productivity of our top producers. That's great. But they don't think about like, are the tools I'm giving them going to also lead to burnout? Are they going to like exhaust them? Which is why I love what you guys do. And I'm so proud of what we do here at Orem. Cause when people initially see like, Oh, I was making 50 calls and now I'm making 300 calls in a day. That's exhausting. That's so many conversations. It's like, no, no, watch.

Anshul Gupta (19:29.165)
Yeah.

Adam Sockel (19:41.602)
how it works, see, understand that it's also giving you time back, which is the thing that I also love about actively is it's all about taking all of the things you're doing and just making it more efficient and much smarter. So that wasn't even a question, that was more of me kind of giving you your flowers. So yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Anshul Gupta (19:59.374)
100 % agree with that.

Adam Sockel (20:01.89)
Okay, let's have some fun. We'll kind of shift into our third segment here. I'm going to ask every guest who comes on just a series of lighthearted questions to kind of give us a little bit of space to play. So the first one was, what was your first job you ever had? It can be when you were a kid, it can be when you were a teenager. What was the first job you ever had?

Anshul Gupta (20:18.223)
Yeah, it's a good question. It's, you know, technically I was, I went the entrepreneurship route, but, you know, when I was not, not lemonade stand, but I guess a nerdier version of that. So when I was eight or nine, our local library, I grew up in the Metroland area, our local library would have, I think it was once a month, $1 book sales, right? And so I would go there, you know what I'm talking about? So I would go there and I guess this was, this was pre -mobile, right? So I'd go there.

Adam Sockel (20:36.962)
Oh yeah.

Anshul Gupta (20:44.335)
Right? Each book I'd run to the computer, look up how much I could sell it for on Amazon or eBay and then buy it up. And like, I got like, you know, an allowance of like, you know, 15 bucks from my, from my parents. And I was like, okay, what can I, what can I do with this? And then obviously, you know, there's you've been to these, so there's hundreds of hundreds of books that, you know, they're obviously the library is trying to raise for donations. And so I can't go through those one by one or else my mom's going to get pretty, pretty annoyed just sitting with me there for hours. So you have to learn like.

kind of cool heuristics. There's obvious ones that I learned that worked really well. Of course, hardcover books generally tend to be worth more larger books with more pages. You know, another one is like the more colorful the cover, right? So you should judge a book by its cover, I guess, is the adage or should be the adage, right? Those also end up being worth more. So yeah, that was my first job.

Adam Sockel (21:34.467)
That is phenomenal. Listen, I am the I'm the son of an English teacher. And I also I started my career working for an organization called Overdrive. They have an ebook and audiobook app called Libby, which lots of people know about as a library app where you can borrow books from the library, digital books on your phone. And it's very, very popular. And so I have.

Anshul Gupta (21:45.294)
Oh cool.

Adam Sockel (21:52.322)
grew up in libraries, so I'm very, very intimately aware of the classic book sale. That is incredible. I love the hustle that you're just like, I'm gonna take these and I'm gonna sell them. It's beautiful. So since you were kind of an entrepreneur from day one, you might not have like a traditional answer for the second one, but what's the worst job you've ever had?

Anshul Gupta (22:00.11)
Yeah.

Anshul Gupta (22:10.542)
Yeah, I actually don't even have a, I don't think anything comes to mind there. I mean, I've had jobs that were maybe less stimulating. Like I briefly worked at Microsoft, which is like classic sort of big tech companies, obviously doing very well with OpenAI. It's got really smart people there, but maybe less intellectually interesting. But in kind of all the different gigs I've had, I've been able to sort of learn something new and work with smart people. So I don't have a good answer there.

Adam Sockel (22:37.73)
Yeah, listen, you set yourself up for success when you at like eight or nine years old were already your own boss, so good on you for that. What is your favorite app from a productivity standpoint? Like what's one that helps you just be better in your day in and day out?

Anshul Gupta (22:55.566)
So this is, yeah, I've had some friends ask me, this is like a counterintuitive answer, but Blitz Chess on chess .com actually makes me more productive. I actually played, you know, embarrassingly enough while I was in the waiting room getting this, kind of the podcast set up, I may or may not have played a game. And why is that, right? Because Blitz Chess, you have three minutes, it's like three minute chess games, right? So you have to think really fast, make decisions, one mistake, you lose the game, right? So kind of like jolts or wakes you up if you're in like a,

LOL, like you just end up thinking faster coming out of it. So yes, like in the moment I'm not productive because I could be talking to you or whatever it might be, but yeah, it's a good wreck.

Adam Sockel (23:36.77)
I love that. That's fantastic. Okay, so this might end up being the same answer then. Do you have a favorite app just for fun? Like I know a lot of people like TingTing, my boss at U of Medical Times loves TikTok. Like do you have an app that you just use for pure enjoyment?

Anshul Gupta (23:46.83)
Yeah.

Anshul Gupta (23:51.438)
Yeah, it's a good question. I will say not TikTok. I'm 50 -50 on maybe leaning towards the band sometimes when it comes to TikTok as a joke. But I would actually say X, like Twitter, whatever you want to call it. I'm a huge sportsman, as you know, like sports means and everything, the coverage on there is great. Just like you can also learn a lot from it too, just like kind of following entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, right? There's all the kind of cultural stuff.

Adam Sockel (24:08.834)
Mm -hmm.

Anshul Gupta (24:18.638)
And then I know we work in sales, but like ads, because you know, Elon's Elon, they aren't a prominent part of the platform, right? Cause he kind of pissed off a lot of the advertisers, right? And so you're not being sold to, which is nice. The DMS are bifurcated, right? Unlike LinkedIn. And so like anyone trying to sell to you, you don't even, you kind of don't, don't really see it. And so, yeah, I highly recommend it.

Adam Sockel (24:39.778)
From a, I will say, I agree with you, especially from a sports standpoint, like I said, I'm also a huge sports fan. At the time of we're recording this at the game six of the Cavs playoff series, we'll see how that turns out. It'll, by the time people hear this, they will either have won or lost. But yeah, watching sports and like Twitter X is undefeated when it comes to real time conversations about things happening. I had no argument there. Yeah. What is your ideal work day?

Anshul Gupta (25:02.318)
Yeah, it's amazing.

Anshul Gupta (25:09.71)
That's a good question. I mean, I think it goes back earlier to what I was saying, which is like, we, you know, spending as much time as possible with customers and users, right. And working with the ones that are, are kind of living in the future and open to doing things very differently than, than what was done before. They're not kind of tied to dogma or old practices, right. And so like as much as time as possible is doing that. And then ultimately, right. Working with, as I mentioned, like we have a really, really strong engineering team that's like,

so fun to work with and we build and ship product at a high rate, put it in front of our customers, right? Iteration cycle. And so that's just that feedback loop is really exciting. And then of course, you know, when you get constructive feedback, that's awesome. But then when, you know, just getting the messages of, Hey, I got promoted or I, you know, I like, I've been booking all these meetings, et cetera, et cetera. Like that's just, there's nothing that beats it.

Adam Sockel (26:02.882)
Yeah, I will say as the person who one of my jobs here is managing all of our social media and getting tagged in those LinkedIn messages about people being like, we just, we got one just last week. Someone was like, we just brought on Orem and we increased our connect rate by 1900%, which feels impossible. And then I saw everyone in the comments that worked at the organization. It was like, no, but for real, this is like changed our lives overnight. That you're absolutely right. Like seeing.

Anshul Gupta (26:19.502)
Wow.

Anshul Gupta (26:28.719)
I actually saw this post, I saw this post and I was like, wait, is there a typo in that number?

Adam Sockel (26:33.602)
I literally I asked because again, like I'm the one who I respond to everybody. I repost and all those different stuff. I asked the CSM. I was like, that can't be right. She's like, no, that was the increase from whatever that I was like, were they just like what number were they only dialing like six number? Like what was happening? I couldn't understand, but it was absolutely wild. Yeah, that was really cool to see. Okay, last question for you. We as everyone listening in will know or knows, or we are big believers in the phone. So.

Anshul Gupta (26:38.702)
Yeah, yeah.

Anshul Gupta (26:50.446)
Yeah.

Adam Sockel (27:03.426)
What is a cold call opener that would get you to at least hear a pitch from somebody?

Anshul Gupta (27:09.582)
Yeah, it's a good question. So interestingly, I feel like I reply to emails more than answer cold calls because with emails, with cold calls, it takes you out of your flow state sometimes, right? Maybe I'm in the middle of something, you get a call, pick it up, all right, then I have to read just back to what I was doing versus emails, you can kind of reply whenever. But on cold calls, there are some that I've picked up and it wasn't a permission -based opener, right, which I know is the classic one. Instead, I got like,

something along the lines of, oh, hey, I saw you liked something on Twitter recently, or were in a blog post, or whatever it might have been. And so then automatically I'm like, okay, interesting, they've done the research. So yeah, I guess I'm curious, have you gotten any good ones recently?

Adam Sockel (27:48.386)
Mm -hmm.

Adam Sockel (27:52.674)
So I joke all the time that I am very cognitive of what we do. So since I started working at Aurum, I pick up cold calls, even the ones that say like spam likely, I pick them up because I want to hear how people will pitch. And so the first thing I pay attention to is the delay between when I say hello and when they actually respond to me. And if it's long, I will call them out. I'll be like, what platform are you using? Cause that was...

Anshul Gupta (28:05.71)
Oh really?

Anshul Gupta (28:19.278)
I love it. Always selling.

Adam Sockel (28:19.618)
awful. I'm like, and either they'll hang up or they will be like, well, we're using insert thing here. I'm not going to trash any competitors on our podcast, but there have been multiple times where like, I literally will, if they say something interesting, like, Hey, let me get 20 seconds of your time. And I'll be like, I'll let you pitch me, but we don't have any budget. And he'll be like, a lot of people say that, but if so, if they will handle my objection in real time, I'll say, okay, that's great. Objection handling, keep going. And I've taken pitches from cold calls for sure, but.

Anshul Gupta (28:25.582)
Yeah.

Adam Sockel (28:48.418)
My proudest thing is I will ask that I ask every single person who calls me, no matter if I take their picture out of big, let me ask you, how did you call me today? And then they go, what do you mean? And I'm like, well, did you use an AI dialing solution or are you just manually dialing? And if they say either like we're, we're manually dialing or like we're using the manual dialer in, you know, a CRM, I'll be like, well, here's what Oram does. I have, we have literally signed, we've, I, yeah, my sales team, like we have signed people because I have just like taken those calls. So that's a, that's a fun way to do it for sure.

Anshul Gupta (29:08.687)
That's great. I love that.

Adam Sockel (29:18.53)
Um, okay, Andrew, where can people get more information about actively and you if they're interested in learning more about everything you guys are doing?

Anshul Gupta (29:18.959)
That's awesome.

Anshul Gupta (29:28.271)
Yeah, obviously www .actively .ai. We were early enough to not have to pay a premium for the .ai. LinkedIn, you can try to, I don't know if my phone number is accurate on Zoom info, but you could try to give me a cold call and see if that works as well. But we're around, we're easy to access.

Adam Sockel (29:51.393)
And I will put the organization and Anshul's LinkedIn in the show notes. I'm not gonna put his phone number in the show notes. I'm not gonna make it that easy for everybody, but really, really appreciate you joining me. Thank you so much for the time. Thank you for being the first guest on the show. This was a blast.

Anshul Gupta (29:57.262)
I'm sorry.

Anshul Gupta (30:06.67)
Awesome, yeah, thanks for having me, Adam.