A challenger brand takes on the stacks

Speaker A: Is the best of breed revenue stack under attack. Today, revenue teams can vibe code applications built for today's AI and data centric environments. While broader platforms offer fewer integration challenges. On this episode of Conversations with Martech, we're talking to Naaman Khan, CMO of Revo, about stacks, challenger brands and more. Welcome to Conversations with Martek. This episode of Conversations with Martek is brought to you by Semrush. Meet yout Unfair advantage. A new SEMrush uniting search and AI discovery into one powerful marketing growth engine. Delivering richer data, more keywords, deeper AI insights and prioritize next steps. With Semrush, you can turn total brand visibility into coordinated action. Get a 14 day free trial and discount code. Visit martech.org SEMrush Coupon or scan the QR code.

Speaker B: Well, hi there. Uh, thanks for the intro, Mike. So I'm Naaman. I'm, uh, an accountant from Canada who got into marketing many, many years ago and has been focused on B2B marketing for uh, all that time. Uh, I'd say my current obsession is with simplifying this concept of a revenue operating system, uh, and helping people understand how AI can really help them, uh, to achieve their goals. Um, obsession I have had for many years is just a little bit of activity in tennis. And so I try to improve my tennis game in between messaging channels, um, and all kinds of fun marketing topics.

Speaker A: All right, so you, you mentioned, um, stacks basically, right? Whether it's a Martech stack or a sales stack, tech stack are stacks that we know them in trouble because you got people who are Vibe coding looking at these applications that cost them money and licenses and say, I can build that because I'm a Vibe coder. You've got platforms like yours that consolidate a whole bunch of functions that used to be, and in some cases still are for some companies, a bunch of point solutions. Right. Um, and then in general we're seeing kind of a move away, it feels like, from those best of breed applications towards these fuller, more featured platforms. Is that what you see?

Speaker B: No question. Certainly, uh, from our vantage point, uh, what we see is over the past decade or so there's really been this focus on building out a best of breed revenue stack. And that meant having your CRM and then building all of the components that you wanted around it and um, being quite proud of that. I think the offset of that approach has just been this integration tax. And so you have sometimes very large, sophisticated rev ops teams who are spending more than 50% of their time not really working on strategic Initiatives to move the business forward, but working on integrations, fixing brittle APIs. Uh, in previous roles that I've had, we would routinely have leads that just somehow slipped through the cracks between HubSpot and Salesforce. And it happened continually. And you know, we would look into why. I would always hear about brittle APIs or silence something or other failing. That's a significant tax, uh, that you pay when you move to best of breed. And so I certainly think that from our vantage point, a lot of our customers don't want to pay that integration tax. Uh, they also don't want to have their sales teams working in 20 tabs just to prep for a meeting. Um, and I think the has really changed. It has been the fact that you can't really leverage the power of AI when you have these sophisticated yet brittle stacks. The data that you need with the context that you need, um, has to be in a unified place. It can't be waiting for things to update. It can't be. Well, I have partially the data, but the three or four elements of metadata from my dialer didn't really connect to some other thing. Uh, that doesn't work. And so I think what people are seeing is that, hey, like in addition to the integration tax, AI just isn't as powerful when you don't have something like Revo. Um, and so certainly from our vantage point, like we see those two reasons driving a lot of interest with customers.

Speaker A: Yeah, data has become so important. There's the, I guess it's old now, the data is the new oil. But you know, if your engine's leaking oil, you're going to have a problem. Right. So like you said, the data's got to flow from app to apply in a, in a stack. And anything that you lose that leaks potentially, uh, costs. You lose value.

Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. It's also not the core competency of your company. Like if you are in the business of manufacturing doors, then you should probably focus on that as opposed to building like this massive like operations infrastructure so you can sell your product. Um, and I think that also I wanted to touch on the Vibe coding point. Like, I think I certainly have a point of view and uh, I think the Vibe coding has certainly made the build versus buy topic, which has been around for many years, a little easier. It's much easier to build 100%. I think when it comes to like our revenue stack, um, we aren't really seeing that in any material way. I think like the security and compliance issues, if you have to handle SoC2 and GDPR and all the rest and the maintenance of that, the technical debt of that, um, people who build that, if they ever leave your company, they're walking away with knowledge of something that was vibe coded. And um, I, I think for, for, for me it's really less about can you do it? It's more, is this the business that you want to be in? Um, and is it more advantageous to have a company who focuses on this on 100% time and has all of the, you know, software development policies and securities that you would want to handle that problem for you? Um, so, yeah, I think it's still early days for that stuff. I think it has a lot of promise, but I don't see it replacing things like a revenue system.

Speaker A: Yeah, all good points and things that IT leadership, developer team leaders would point out, right, that the security, the institutional knowledge, um, there's a bunch of stuff, I mean you see people on LinkedIn, I built this app to replace it with live coding. But, um, you know, is it a production ready, enterprise ready platform? Not. Probably not.

Speaker B: Yeah. And are you going to accommodate like the 30 things your users are going to want every couple of weeks and who's going to handle that? And like, it's just your core competency, like the fact that it's easier to build. I don't really know whether it changes like the fundamental question.

Speaker A: Yeah. You've worked for Salesforce and Dropbox, both of which are big names in their spaces. And now you're at Revo, which we might consider to be like a challenge challenger brand, how does that impact the way that you think about your team's work in marketing?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. So being a challenger brand for a marketer, uh, is a ton of fun and exciting actually. Like Salesforce, getting a meeting is a little different than getting a meeting. When you're at a challenger brand and no one knows you, um, it just puts more and more, uh, emphasis on really great marketing. And I think that actually is a, is a ton of fun. When I think about how the challenger position affects marketing, there are probably a few things that come to mind. The first one is that as a challenger brand, is there a pain that you can uniquely solve for your customer? And I think it goes back to the, we call it a Frankenstack issue that, you know, exists with our customers that are on these legacy platforms. So as a challenger brand, like, you need to have something that you solve. And for us, like, there's a very clear pain that we solve the hours and hours that are spent on these Frankenstacks, the amount of data loss that happens, the inability to leverage AI. Like, these are really big problems. These are not, like, insignificant things. So as a challenger brand, just being very on the problem you solve is the first part. I think the second thing, uh, and this is actually a really exciting one, is that when you're starting out like we are, you really don't have to do things that scale. Like, you really have to focus on a pretty small, I call it a subculture of your audience and just really, really happy. Um, you know, we're doing things like having community dinners now. We have a couple set up in New York and some in the east coast and the West Coast. And we've had great response from revenue leaders who want to come and talk about, like, what they're doing to modernize their revenue, uh, system. Uh, you know, could we do that every day of the week for 10 years? Probably not. But at our scale, it's wonderful. Like, we've gotten so much, um, feedback. We're going to do multiple community events now because the feedback has been so strong. So picking these, uh, tactics that don't necessarily have to scale to, like, a production campaign is also part of, I think, being a challenger brand.

Speaker A: Uh, you mentioned the dinners, the community dinners, and you also mentioned, like, you don't need to scale, you don't need to be everywhere.

Speaker B: That's right.

Speaker A: There are so many channels available to marketers these days. Um, what else is working in terms of marketing and messaging and like, where, where else, uh, do you think that your brand could be?

Speaker B: Well, we want it to be everywhere, but I think, as you said, like, when you start, like, you kind of have to take, uh, it one step at a time. I think in terms of channels, let's start with messaging. The all in one message has actually been resonating really, really well for us. So the customers that we have now and we literally, we can't really keep up with the demand that we're seeing. Um, people want to move off of these, like, very complex systems and move on to something that's much more unified. Uh, they also want to invest, uh, in a system that is, you know, AI native. It's the term a lot that's used in the industry. Um, so from a messaging perspective, that's really working. I think what you'll see us do is as our product roadmap becomes even stronger, we're launching some amazing things in Q2. I think what you'll see us do is move even beyond the integration value prop and move much, much more into helping you do tasks autonomously. Uh, we already do that in the product. Um, but as that gets even stronger I think what you'll see is that messaging will now reflect hey, like not only do we provide this very clean all in one revenue, ah, platform but we also will do probably 20 of the tasks out of your 25 that you need to do today. Um, and you can control them from like a vantage point as a sales leader. Like that autonomous sort of like management of a process or governance, um, I think is uh, going to be another compelling message for us. Um, in terms of channels that are working. Uh, you know we do um, a few things so we like, we invest quite a bit in content and community. So content with our aeo, SEO and geo, those are the new terms and ultimately focus on those. We're making really good progress. We're starting to focus more on owned social, you know, owned social, LinkedIn, uh, X, that is a non negotiable, you have to be present. Our community is all there. Uh, so we've just started investing in those and seeing some really good attraction communities I mentioned like online and offline communities. That's something we're focused on. Uh, and then we also have a group that focuses on like advocates. And so we have lots of other uh, people in the industry who feel very strongly about this topic, uh, and advocate for what they see in Revo. And then of course the stuff you might expect, like we do targeted email outreach, we do some like paid on um, uh, media and so forth. Um, but the ones that I think are really important to us are the organic ones. Building the value based communities, building the content that resonates with people as opposed to sort of like focusing too much on paid.

Speaker A: Yeah, um, when you say people come to you and they're interested in an AI native platform, like what does that mean to them? What are they looking for? We talked to Ryan Warren from Razorfish for an episode and we kind of touched on how people have sort of bolted AI onto applications. It's not the most elegant thing in a lot of cases, but what do they picture as AI native when they come to you?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good question. I don't think there's like a universal definition yet of what AI native means. Uh, for me I think it's two elements of what makes something AI native. The first thing is actually the architectural choices in the app. So the architecture of our app. And I'm not a CTO when I spend time with Our technical uh, team, it's amazing the stuff that they've done. I just don't quite follow all the technical uh, topics that they cover. But using things like a vector database that can consume different taps, the structured and semi structured data, like that's an architectural decision that unlocks the power of AI in a way that like a different type of database would not. Uh, the way that the uh, different capabilities are like unified, like they're not integrated. It's just like one code base that you know, has all of the different capabilities all the way from dialing to prospecting created a tam, like enriching. Like all of that stuff is like one, one technical architecture. So that's a little hard to explain to people who don't have like engineering backgrounds. But AI native really starts from the ground up. Did you build it to be AI native? So there's an architectural component that's like, we should probably invest more, I think in unpacking how we do that at Revo, because it's actually pretty, uh, pretty amazing. The second part I think about being AI native is the experience. And so when you think of revenue platforms, very rarely do you think you open it and there's a screen that looks like Revo does. Um, you can have a traditional screen with like a pipeline view, or you can just have a view that has a prompt that you can type into or you can talk to, you can say revo, tell me what are the three things I should focus on today to maximize my revenue potential. And Revo will tell you that's such a different. That is AI native. Uh, to me certainly the infrastructure is important. The user experience, then the way they interact with the system also has to be something that's much more 2026. None of this, uh, menus and pivoting filters and like creating reports. Like you should just tell it what you want. Uh, and then as I mentioned as we get into more like you know, agentic forward, you probably don't even need to ask it. You probably need to. When you open Revo, it'll just tell you, hey, proactively, here's what you should be doing today. I've blocked these three calls for you and that sort of thing. So that experience is completely different. That is AI native. And as you said, I think it's um, when you have a legacy code base, legacy architecture, doing what I just said is like not really that easy. Bolting it on will feel like you, you know, you bolted it on.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's increasingly the way that we interact with Our software is just telling it what you need. And, you know, we've come a long way since, uh, SQL strengths and other things that we had to do to get reports way back when.

Speaker B: Yeah, it is a lot like what you would see in sci fi movies. Like, I remember when I was at Salesforce at Dreamforce, which is our big conference, we had, uh, this keynote, uh, event, and Mark Benioff came on. It was the year Siri came out. And he said, siri, you know, where am I going to come in this week on my number? And then Siri replied and the audience just like, loved it and went berserk. Um, you know, that was quite a number of years ago. That's beyond possible now. Like, that's, that's like super easy to do. Um, but that just reflects how people want to interact with their tools. Like, it should be much more like a very friendly consumer style, easy, like, little to no onboarding type experience as opposed to like, you know, enterprise, uh, tools that require, you know, onboarding and so on.

Speaker A: Yeah. Tell us about the start of your tenure as cmo. Did you have to take a lot of time to evaluate, like, the operations and the team? Did you have a good idea of what you wanted to get done in a short amount of time once you came on board? Like, what was your mindset going into the role?

Speaker B: I see. Um, I think in terms of the mindset, there's one word that comes to mind which is being, um, builder. And that's what we call ourselves here at Riva. We're all builders. We don't really have titles or anything like that, which I think is really, really wonderful. Um, um, I think for me it's a personal question, but I think for me, like, the thing that's kept me interested in marketing is I consider it to be a craft, um, because, like, it's got such a diverse set of capabilities. Like somebody who works on brand identity will care about like the color gradient in an ad. And then marketing is also about, well, what is your LTV to cac on this particular, like, channel? And then in the middle is like, what's the messaging that will be different from what everyone else is saying? Like, that almost takes like three different types of people. So it's so diverse that, um, you know, being able to treat it like a craft is really the part that excites me. And so that was my mindset going in, which is that the space of revenue platforms, CRM type, you know, uh, platforms, it's just, um, it's just ripe for someone to come and make it relevant, exciting, useful, you know, um, progressive. It needs a space in, like, 2026. I think, like, there's really nothing that comes to mind when you think of these things as a vendor or, like, a company that's made this, like, relevant in 2026. So treating marketing like a craft is my mindset. Not being too bogged down in all the mechanics of marketing, but really trying to connect at a human level, humanize it, make it rele. Uh, I don't think anyone's done that. I think Salesforce was probably the company that did it last time, and the brand identity was this wonderful, sort of like creatures of the national forest and humanizing it. Um, but that was 20 years ago, right? So I think, like, in the age of AI that needs a bit of a crank. Um, so that's really the thing that I was focused on. But as I said, marketing is so diverse. Right. So you kind of have to pick a spot.

Speaker A: All right, naming Khan. Thanks for joining us on conversations with Martech.

Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for having me, Mike.