SaaS Scaling Secrets
The SaaS Scaling Secrets podcast reveals the strategies and insights behind scaling B2B SaaS companies to new heights. Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility, leads conversations with successful SaaS CEOs, exploring their challenges, triumphs, and the secrets that propelled their businesses to the next level.
SaaS Scaling Secrets
Skipping SMBs to Conquer the Enterprise with Brandon Card, CEO of Terzo
Dan Balcauski speaks with Brandon Card, CEO and Founder of Terzo, an enterprise AI platform focused on contract intelligence for Fortune 500 companies. Brandon shares his journey from working at tech giants like Microsoft and IBM to founding Terzo, highlighting the challenges of targeting enterprise clients and creating new budget line items for AI solutions. They discuss the importance of charging for proof of concepts, focusing on long-term thinkers in the hiring process, and identifying 'Mavericks' within enterprises who are willing to drive innovation. Brandon emphasizes the necessity of patience and integrity in building a successful company and reveals how Terzo uniquely approaches the complex enterprise sales cycle.
01:55 Brandon Card's Journey and the Birth of Terzo
03:59 Understanding Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM)
06:34 Focusing on Enterprise Clients
17:50 The Importance of Charging for POCs
22:28 Targeting the Office of the CFO
26:39 Challenges of Saying No to Potential Clients
30:45 Recruiting the Right Sales Team
42:03 Creating New Budget Line Items
47:27 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Guest Links
Our advisor said, you're crazy to go after the enterprise. Sales cycles are too long, too slow, too complex. You don't have a brand name. You cannot win the SMB in mid-market and think the enterprise is gonna trust you. It's a very different market. There's very few VCs in the entire world that have probably even had of the volume In the enterprise, that I've had. Always play fair, not charge. You don't have to charge a lot of money and make profit, but the act of doing the transaction and getting money makes that customer more bought in more all in and going to put more time And effort into the project. That's, part of being an entrepreneur is everyone's telling you're wrong and then still waking up and believing in what you're doing and never quitting. All the beautiful things in life take time, and that's what a lot of people learn, whether you're in this business or many other things in life. sales are won and lost when you are not in the room. That is the truest thing I've said on this podcast the whole time.
Dan Balcauski:Welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast that brings you the inside stories from the leaders of the best scale up. B2B SaaS companies. I'm your host, Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility. Today I'm excited to welcome Brandon Card, CEO, and founder of Terzo, a leading enterprise AI platform, transforming how Fortune 500 companies manage contracts spend and supplier data with 99% accuracy and contract intelligence. Brandon combines a background in Microsoft and IBM with a passion for mental health conscious leadership, and AI's role in reshaping business. Brandon, great to have you on SaaS Scaling Secrets.
Brandon Card:Great to be here. Dan. Excited for the conversation. Excited to share some stories.
Dan Balcauski:I am excited to hear them. And Brandon, for listeners who aren't familiar with Terzo, can you give us the elevator pitch? What do you do? Who do you serve?
Brandon Card:Turso is an enterprise AI contract intelligence company. We read supplier contracts and customer contracts for the largest companies in the world and show them where all their revenues coming in from and show'em where all
Dan Balcauski:Okay,
Brandon Card:is going across their supply chain by extracting metadata from these PDF contract and
Dan Balcauski:lots.
Brandon Card:with the CFO procurement supply chain people who are managing finances, but we are an office of the CFO solution
Dan Balcauski:so deep into the critical business. data that is trapped inside PDFs. And whether that's contracts around the invoices. What what led you to start torso after your time as an employee of Microsoft and IB.
Brandon Card:I started my career actually at Oracle. So I worked at Oracle IBM, and Microsoft, and I was working with Fortune 500 customers the entire time at all three companies. And then I started to hear about this problem almost every single day when I was working at Microsoft 20 15, 20 16, 20 17. My customers had really complex relationships with Microsoft across the world that we were managing oftentimes 20, 30, 40 active contracts. And they would always ask us for the contract data and we realized that they didn't have any of this data in any systems, And we thought, wow what the heck's going on? I thought there'd be, there's a category for this called CLM. we learned a secret CLMs were not being used by people in procurement or IT or finance, and they were only being used in pockets of the business. So all of our customers kept complaining about not having analytics or insights into their contracts, and that's how Terzo was born. I realized that our, wonderful friends and brilliant people at Microsoft weren't building this application layer. They were focused on Azure. So we went out in March, 2020 and started focusing on building Terzo AI on the Azure platform. And building our proprietary neural network to read all of these contracts.
Dan Balcauski:That strikes me as surprising where you say that there's this whole category of CLM or contract lifecycle management, but it wasn't being used by the folks you were talking to, to get operational insights, where were those solutions primarily focused?
Brandon Card:Yeah, so it's a great
Dan Balcauski:I.
Brandon Card:That's one thing I learned very well before starting Touro. Contract lifecycle management's been around for almost 20 years. It was designed for lawyers to do drafting templating and as a storage repository. It was not designed to one extract metadata from documents. It was not designed to have any type of financial insights, which is a huge problem. They don't have spend data or financial data from the contract in these CLMs. They're basically a repository for legal, and that is the secret we discovered. And in the largest organizations in the world have a hundred thousand plus employees, maybe 20 employees. Out of the a hundred thousand would have access to the CLM That is the secret we discovered before going out and building Terzo. We thought it was one of the biggest problems in the enterprise was that this solution was a point solution only being used by a few people in the company. It wasn't an enterprise wide application. And that's the Huge opportunity that we saw Dan back in
Dan Balcauski:So mostly focused on helping the attorneys in their workflow, the approvals. But then once those were executed, it went into a folder, a bucket somewhere, and the rest of the business couldn't extract any operational details out of it.
Brandon Card:Yeah. And the reality is when you look at a big company, they're saving the same contract in many different locations. So let's just talk about Microsoft for a second. I would give my customer, fortune 100 customer, the Microsoft contract. Legal might put it in their CLM. Finance might put it in OneDrive procurement might put it in Ariba, Dan, and it might put it on a C drive. These documents are stored in many different siloed locations. That's why when you look at a big enterprise today, they have contract data in 30, 40, 50 different systems. And that's one of the big challenges that we approach is to figure out how to aggregate and centralize all this siloed contract data. And you think about all the people that turn over in these roles, right? Dan? These people come in they like a different solution. They'll save it in box, for example, right? Or they'll save it in, on the teams folder. So the bottom line is this contract data is extremely important, precious data, and it's living all over the place in the enterprise. It's not centralized. There's no reporting, there's no search, there's no analytics. That's why terms was created.
Dan Balcauski:You hinted at it several times in that you guys are focused on the enterprise. I'm curious,'cause I would say most SaaS companies, the default is to maybe start like SMB and then move up market. You did the opposite with this kind of pure focus on enterprise, why'd you decide to make life hard for yourself? Did you view it that way? Why go enterprise first?
Brandon Card:Yeah. We did view it that way. Everyone viewed it that way too. Honestly, there's a few reasons why we started with the. And day one, we were building an enterprise SaaS company because our goal was to get a product out that our customers could start using. But our strategy behind, closed doors was to build an enterprise AI platform, but we needed to go get the venture capital to go invest and build the AI
Dan Balcauski:Hmm.
Brandon Card:day one, we knew when this team came together, we wanted to be an AI company, but we'd have to go get millions of dollars of venture capital to actually build the ai. So to get started. built this enterprise SaaS application that was not powered by AI day one. And the reason why we went after the Fortune 500 is my experience and my co-founder's experience at the time was primarily big enterprise We understood those customers very well. We understand the challenges from IT perspective. We understood their IT stacks. two, this was a much bigger problem in the enterprise. If you look at the Fortune 100 alone. Amazon, Microsoft, JP Morgan Chase, they spend 95% of all the money across all B2B activity in the world. So when you look at all the dollars, the majority of it's being spent in the Fortune 100, fortune 500, that's where the majority of the waste is. That's where the majority of optimization opportunity is. So we knew companies were bleeding billions of dollars in the Fortune 500 or smaller companies are still losing money, but it's probably 30 grand. It's not gonna move the needle for them. Big customers, like the banks are losing billions per year because they don't have this data and they're not tracking all these important contracts. So we thought if we're gonna make an impact and we're gonna, actually help people, then this is the best place to start. And I can tell you, investor said that we were crazy. E even the angel investors who were friends of ours said, you're crazy to go after the enterprise. Our advisor said, you're crazy to go after the enterprise. Sales cycles are too long, too slow, too complex. You don't have a brand name. You gotta start SMB at mid-market. And we understood those challenges. We understood that, strategy because that's how most companies have success. But we knew that we could solve the enterprise problem and all we needed to do was land a few marquee logos to get that trust and credibility early on. So that's where we put all of our, focus and energy early on, was figuring out how do we land a couple big logos to then go get that momentum and credibility to land more large enterprise.
Dan Balcauski:So the Tam story makes sense. The money being spent attached to those contracts is in the Fortune 100, fortune 500 to. Appropriately serve that market, you're gonna have to go raise capital. You start talking to people who have that capital. They tell you you're crazy. Go this other direction. I guess how did you respond to that? Obviously you somewhat ignored their advice
Brandon Card:Yeah,
Dan Balcauski:where you're today.
Brandon Card:so yeah, I did ignore a lot of their advice and I was stubborn about it, which a lot of entrepreneurs are stubborn, right? That's a pro and con of dealing with a guy like myself or any CEO and founder. We're very, delusional in certain things and we're stubborn with what we believe in. And I promised the investors that we wouldn't go out And raise a lot of money until we validated that we had enterprise customers and we landed two. Marquee enterprise customers, the largest financial transaction processor in The, world. And then we also landed the second largest retailer in. the world. And when we got those two customers to. sign these first contracts, that is when some investors said to me, oh, this is interesting. I had some people starting to believe, wait, you guys can go through these motions. Okay. So we went out and we bootstrapped the company in the very beginning to get the product live. And then we took in just a very little bit of venture capital in the seed round to go get those early customers. So we didn't go out and raise that, that$16 million series A that, that was publicized. We didn't go out and raise that until we already had a handful of enterprise customers on board. So the risk was a little bit lower. But I can tell you that even then many VCs came into the round and said, Hey, I think you should be going down market more velocity, lower the A SP. Get more pipeline, get more wins, learn more, get more logos. And we just thought to ourselves, and I still believe this today, Dan, this is the thing that I'll tell entrepreneurs. we go land 10 mid-market companies and we have a ton of success and we get a lot of momentum, we will still not be a trusted enterprise player. You cannot win the SMB in mid-market and think the enterprise is gonna trust you. It's a very different market. So we knew that having success in mid-market wasn't gonna help us. Go upstream. if you look at the companies that had success in the enterprise early on, companies like ServiceNow, companies like Workday, companies like CrowdStrike, they didn't start off SMB and Mid-market. They started off in the enterprise and built enterprise trust. They didn't go down, they went down market later on. But that's one thing I knew that I'll never get Walmart to trust me. If I have every small mid-market customer in the world. Walmart's still not gonna think that we can serve them. They're gonna label us an SMB mid-market company and that is the what I knew from my years of working with these comp customers. We cannot be labeled a mid-market enterprise company or mid-market small business company. Excuse me. We have to be an enterprise focused player, which means we're gonna have less customers overall. We're gonna have bigger deal sizes, and we're gonna have longer sales cycles. It's just part of that game.
Dan Balcauski:I'm curious'cause you said, hey, in order to secure this funding to prove we have traction, we've gotta go land some of these accounts first and that's. I think maybe, probably not a real barrier, but a lot of people view that as a real barrier of Hey, I'm gonna show up to these first couple accounts and ask them, Hey just trust me. And they are enterprise, how do you view that situation where you feel like, I guess obviously you took those steps and were landed those first few accounts. In the enterprise, in a market segment that requires, high trust and validation. What, how does your perspective differ from, say, the status quo bias out there where yeah, I've heard that story before of yeah, you gotta go prove out in the mid-market for them to trust you, and you're like, no, we're going after that. And so those first few conversations, how did, like, how did you approach those early folks?
Brandon Card:yeah that's a really good question. So first of all. I've done, I ha My experience is very important because I've done hundreds of enterprise deals. I've won hundreds of deals, I've lost hundreds of deals. I've lost a lot of deals. I've learned a lot about the enterprise, There's very few VCs in the entire world that have probably even had of the volume In the enterprise, that I've had. Have the knowledge and experience in how these customers operate. I know how they think. I know the psychology of the buying cycle. I know what matters to'em. I know their checklist. I sat in these offices for years side by side with these people. I know these buyers, so I knew what we needed to get in with And I knew what type of requirements, simple things. SOC one, SOC two, ISO 27 0 1, just to get in the door and get approved as a vendor. Really basic checklist, right? Running in environments like Azure and AWS and having all the security requirements that are needed just to get in. the one thing that we did, I think that was unique was that we went in with. customers like Home Depot and Swift Financial and Blue Cross Blue Shield, and we said, look, here's our platform. Here's the problem we're solving. They all agreed on the problem. The problem was huge. And we said, if you start with us in a proof of concept, we will build what you need in the next year. And they said, really? And we gave one in with a very low price, gave'em the solution, listened to the requirements, and started working with them every week. getting feedback and iterating, and we were doing proof of concepts and building out a lot of our platform early on with these customers. And we turned this into an innovation project for them. And we knew that they had innovation dollars and we knew that AI was something that was gonna be important to their leadership team. So we, basically found a way to get them to give us their data early on. And we provided a lot of value by taking their feedback to go develop things in our roadmap and build product for them for very low cost compared to what they would do with, the alternative players in the space like the Accentures or the Deloittes of the world. You're talking about$30 million to get started with a provider like an Accenture. We are going in for under a hundred K and saying, Hey, we'll build something similar. So that was the give and take we had early on was to really make a bet on ourselves and our engineering team. And work very closely with these customers, and the biggest challenge we had, and entrepreneurs probably know this, is getting the time and focus from these enterprises. was one of the hard things that we needed to figure out. How do we get customers to pay attention to us? How do we make this important enough and a high enough priority? The way we did it is because we were talking about cost optimization during a macro environment where everyone was panicking during COVID, so we played off those tailwinds. And we realized every company was trying to figure out how to cut expenses. The stock market obviously was hot in the beginning. There was layoffs happening like crazy working from home, all these things, right? But CFOs and a lot of leaders behind closed doors were trying to figure out how do we optimize our expenses and all this new world we're living in, and how do we track all these dollars that are going outta the company? That was a big focus for a lot of people in procurement and finance during that time. And then, as we went through a, a lot of turmoil and chaos in the macro environment. And leaders got scared. They got scared because politics were horrendous, beyond horrendous in the, at the federal and, the global level stock market was, up and down. People were gonna work from home. There's layoffs left and right. There was so much instability, so much uncertainty that we went in and said, Hey, we're gonna help you optimize your expenses. We're gonna help you save five to 10% if you do this project with us. So we played off of that macro theme of cutting expenses, consolidating and figuring out where all this money's going. It was a good time for us to do that. So that's how we got customers to actually do these projects with us.
Dan Balcauski:It's in that arc there you laid out. I was thinking. I don't know if this resonates at all with you, but Palmer lucky with his company and Orel now where he's going up against the big defense contractors where he's bringing a product model as you were discussing. What are the relevant alternatives these other folks have? It's to get an Accenture, Deloitte to come in and build some big custom software where they're paying time and materials for some, solution with and your value proposition is. Hey, like we're taking a product model. We're gonna come in and be a, you're gonna be a design partner alongside of us, and we're gonna build, and you're gonna, you're gonna pay us as like a product company. It's, no matter what that, that price is, it's gonna be a fraction of what you're gonna charge for this bespoke, Consulting software that you might get otherwise, which I think is super interesting. One, one. thing I wanna double click on there is, You did say that you charged, These design partners for POC. And so this is a, I spend all my time in the pricing world and it doesn't come up super often, but every once in a while folks will ask about charging for POCs and some folks will be like we're really getting all the value out of it, so we feel bad charging. But you did, I'm curious how you thought about that decision and how you thought about that value exchange within that sort of design partnership.
Brandon Card:yeah. It's a great question. It's a great point too for your audience. They should, this is some point that I would nail home, and I'll probably talk about it a lot throughout the rest of the year on other podcasts and then even, in front of audiences, we always charge for POCs. We still charge for POCs and we will always charge for POCs. That's never going to change because it has nothing to do with the actual dollars. It has to do with the human psychology of them doing a transaction and paying money for something. Therefore, they have skin in the game and therefore they show up with purpose and actually care. No one cares in life if they get anything for free. They just don't. That's the psychology of the human mind, right? if we went into a big company and said, Hey, it's$30,000 to do this POC, that's really nothing for them, it's basically free. if we go in and say,$0 to do A POC, you're gonna start seeing people not showing up for the calendar invites and the cadence calls. You're gonna see people not responding to emails. This is a free thing, whatever. It's not a big deal. It's the mental psychology. You pay 30 K, which is what some customers paid us. Next thing they're taking it seriously because they actually paid for something, so they think they need to get something in return for it. That is the psychology that we realized after. I've done POCs for free for years, other companies. I wasn't the ultimate approver. Now I realized, wow, I made mistakes in the past. Every time I did a free POC. People didn't care that much, right? People would maybe care half the time. People were not all in. So we needed our customers to be all in and we didn't really care what that price was, but we needed a dollar amount for them to pay us to get that conviction that, okay, we're actually gonna put real skin in the game. We're gonna put real people on this. We're gonna take this seriously, have a project manager, project plan, and we're gonna be just like every other project, we're gonna be a certified company-wide project that has dollars behind it. And that is the psychology I would tell every founder in the world to think about. you give anything away for free, you dilute your brand. You dilute yourself, Because these entrepreneurs that are out there building great products and, and solving complex problems, their time ain't free. Why? Why should they get on calls of customers all the time? They gotta build, building a company. They got a lot of stuff to do. Investors and employees and product. You have to have respect for your own time as well. And I truly believe that the customers you wanna work with, if they respect you and they believe in you, they don't expect anything for free. That's really the truth of you. You talk to'em behind, I talk to'em all the time right on the side, and they said, Hey, we know you guys, you care. You're passionate. You show up, you do your best work. We don't expect that for free. We don't expect that level of service for free. So my, my coaching entrepreneur is, is that. Always play fair, not charge. You don't have to charge a lot of money and make profit, but the act of doing the transaction and getting money makes that customer more bought in more all in and going to put more time And effort into the project. And that's what I've learned a lot throughout my career. Rear.
Dan Balcauski:I absolutely a hundred percent agree with everything you just said there. and I've talked about this in other venues, so I'm not gonna go into my rant, but I really hate freemium and I think people make the same mistake with freemium approaches in general. But if you guys want to hear my take on that I've covered it in plenty of other venues.
Brandon Card:I'll pick on our friends at Microsoft. I love Microsoft, right? And I have nothing but respect for the company, the leadership, everyone over there. I couldn't say enough good things about Microsoft they're crushing it for a reason.'cause they have incredible leadership. But when I talk to their sales reps all the time, their sales leaders, when you, when they go into customers and say, Hey, we'll do a free POC with copilot, do you think the customer cares? I think the
Dan Balcauski:No.
Brandon Card:Puts their best people on it. They're like, ah, Microsoft's offering a free POC. All right, cool. Yeah, we'll, we'll try it on Friday afternoon. And then Palantir goes in and says, Hey, you wanna do a POC with us? It's 10 million bucks to get started. Very different. Very different approach, right? And, Palantir is getting that money for these projects because they're saying, no, no, we know what our time is worth. We know how imp we know how good we are. You're not getting anything for free from us. and that's a great approach as well. Also a phenomenal company. but, my point is, even if you're Microsoft and you're$4 trillion. Enterprise behemoth and you would offer something for free. The end customer's oh, this is free. Don't really have to do much. Don't care. So always remember that, right?'cause it's happening right now. Microsoft is going into accounts and telling them our customers, they can do similar things that Terzo can do with some of this AI and we'll test it for free. Have they had success yet? Not yet. And they won't have success doing that. So that's something that I you know, hearing and seeing all the time even in the big enterprise.
Dan Balcauski:I'm curious, going back to the beginning of our conversation when you said that, you're selling these days focused mostly on the office of the CFO, Contract management. As you were outlining it, right? Traditionally, CLM was focused on the attorneys and their workflow. But there's so much business data that other areas of operational business need access to that's valuable for. How, How, did you end up on the CFO? I could see, 10 or 15 different stakeholders within a large enterprise. that might be The right stakeholder to, to go after. Especially when you're talking about large enterprises. I know a lot. I was talking, I was on a call earlier today and that, it's like large bank. Everyone, every large bank has a chief AI person. Like why not be like, Hey, chief AI person, we got an AI tool for you for contract management.
Brandon Card:we're dealing with Chief AI people, but the, here's the thing, and this is an important point that I always talk to everyone about, and I'm gonna talk to you about it too, right? Everyone on the finance side of the house for the last 30 years has ignored contracts. are a financial asset. They're not a legal asset. They have legal terms. Contracts are bringing money into your company. Contracts are, making money. Leave your company, right? That's, it's in and out. It's revenue and expenses. Revenue expenses. These are business relationships. The CFO has been relying upon the ERP for the last 30 years. All that is is historical ledger data. Yeah. Finance teams actually need the contract data to know what is in the forecast, to know what they should be budgeting, to know the big commitments they've made across different, customers and suppliers. To all of this important cost data around your supply chain to know what you paid per unit for different products that you're purchasing for your physical goods. Finance teams actually realized, holy shit, we need the contract data to make decisions. That was the big epiphany that happened in the 2000 twenties and why it was happening in 2000 twenties. ERP systems cannot provide contract data. The P two P systems like Coupa and Ariba also don't have contract data. They're repositories. And then the CLM, again, is a wedged away point solution that somebody paid 40 K for and legal, and no one cares about it. So then you talk to the C ffo, got a bunch of people reporting to them like procurement and obviously, fp and a and other groups. And the only system they have to rely on is the ERP. That's the only system they have to rely on to get financial data. So that's why they live in spreadsheets all day and they live in, Tableau, power BI type of solutions. But most of the CFOs and the procurement people that we talk to, we're trying to track all of the dollars being spent in the company. when we say office of the CFO, that could be the Chief procurement officer that reports in the CFO, that could be the head of supply chain that reports in the CFO, could be the head of fp and a reports in the CFO. Our point is that we're getting budget from the CFO office and the CFO is trying to govern of dollars of revenue and spend, and he can't, they can't do it in the ERP. is the big epiphany that a customer's had. And no one expects SAP or Oracle to go build this AI in their ERP platforms overnight. So that is why we found that nice niche in the CFO office to go sit on top of the ERP and supercharge and compliment that system.'cause we're not a rip and replace, right? We go sit on top as an intelligent data layer and finance teams love this data that they don't have today.
Dan Balcauski:I, to, to continue on the area of focus. I think, it's interesting. So you have, yeah. Everyone, investors friends and family, hey, don't go after the enterprise. You're like, Hey, yeah, yeah. You ignore that advice. You go enterprise. First anyway, but any business owner will tell you that just because you decided on a target doesn't mean that folks that maybe are outside of that won't come knocking on your door. I'm curious, I'm imagining with, the platform you've built that you do get folks who are outside of that Fortune 500, potentially mid-market customers coming to knock on your door. Are there ways that you think about. Keeping the organization focused, like saying, like explicitly saying, Hey these folks aren't a fit, and we're gonna say, we're gonna say no to this group of customers, even though they might be waving dollars interface to come buy from us.
Brandon Card:that honestly, Dan, that was one of the hardest things we had to do. of the hardest things I had to do, if you ask me from a sales and go to market perspective. Was to say no to really great companies who wanted to use our solution, we said no because they weren't willing to pay for the value that they were receiving in the solution. They were all about price. So for example, a lot of great high growth companies would come to us and say, Hey, we're looking at a CLM for 12 K. Can we get a quote for Zo? And we say, oh, we started 200,000. We're not ACL M, but even though we compete with some CLMs, we have a lot more value than that. And they'd say, oh our budget's maximum 18 grand. that doesn't work for us. Our price starts at 200. So we would constantly turn away people because we knew that if we started getting distracted and started onboarding all these customers paying us 12 and 18 grand, we learn a lot. We'd get some nice logos, but would have to put so much time and. Effort into our CS and deployment and customer operations group that we would be pulling away from companies like Home Depot and Cisco and Delta Airlines. And we thought, wait, we can't do this early on. This is too risky. How can we have a customer paying us 400 K and the customer paying us 12 K?
Dan Balcauski:Mm.
Brandon Card:We're building an enterprise business. So one of the challenges that I had to make, and a lot of people probably thought I was foolish or stupid for doing it, we'd have a lot of great companies pre IPO companies come to us and say, Hey, we want to use Terzo. I'll pay you 20 grand. I said, no, thank you. You, and we've had customers. Now public companies are great companies that say, Hey, our budget this year for contract software is 36 grand. I said thank you for your business. See you later. You're not our customer. Our customers know that they're governing billions of dollars in contract assets, and that if they even optimize two, three, 4%, it's millions of dollars in return. How can you wanna pay$30,000 for something that you're gonna get millions of dollars in ROI for? a huge disconnect in an understanding, and that's not the right DNA. But the funny thing is, right on the flip side, had mid-market companies come to us and say, Hey, this is a$30 million problem for us. We're willing to pay six figures. We're like, really? they're like, yes. This is a massive problem for us. We don't have any of our contract data. We're losing money every month. We got audited and we're willing to pay whatever it takes'cause we think that we're leaving 25 to$30 million on the table. It. So interesting enough, we do have some mid-market size customers that pay enterprise prices because they perceive this as a huge problem. are the type of customers that we try to qualify, right? But early on it was very hard. We had some sexy logos coming in saying, Hey, we'll pay you 20 K. I'm telling the sales team we don't want those deals Politely say no, and let's go focus on the big wells. And that was something, especially during the 2020 2 23 time period, people were like, why you. saying no to some of these great customers, they, they could pay you a hundred K in three or four years. I'm like, or I could go get a Fortune 500 customer and they could pay me two 50 K next week. that's where we're gonna put our time and effort. So that was a strategy thing and a preference thing that, we carved out. But I also looked at, know, the people that have done this before, Palantir, C3, ai, ServiceNow, all these type of companies. ever dropped their pricing to get new logos. They focused on their target ICP, and that's exactly what we do. And that's a public, Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000 entity.
Dan Balcauski:I, I, that's yeah, I love that focus and I'm sure that was not. It's not easy, right? It sounds smooth as you tell it, but I'm sure there was emotion behind that when someone's waving tens of thousands of dollars not maybe the hundreds.
Brandon Card:would call me up and say, why would you not take$20,000 B. Why would we not take, why would we not go onboard this customer? It's not a huge scope. Let's go serve this customer. And I know what it takes to serve a customer the right way. We never want to do anything halfway. We always wanna give a hundred percent to every single one of our customers. And I knew we were not in a position to do that, and I knew that we needed to be really focused. But on honestly, was probably one of the most painful. Periods going through that when everyone disagrees with you and you have to believe in yourself and stick with your strategy when everyone's telling you're an idiot. And That's, part of being an entrepreneur is everyone's telling you you're wrong and then still waking up and believing in what you're doing and never quitting.
Dan Balcauski:I'm curious so on that, on operationalizing that because you could sit in your chair at the seat of the company and say no to everyone. I'm curious how you thought about bringing the right people into the company. Who who maybe understood that?'cause I can imagine right? There's, there's CS of, of salespeople or go-to market people out there and they have some playbook from, Some mid-market or s and, b focus firm. And and potentially these are some of the folks coming to you being like, Hey we sold, I got a relationship over here. We sold to'em at my last company. They wanna pay us 20,000. Like, why not? I guess how did you think about f bringing in the right DNA of folks that adopted your point of view on this situation? Or was it just whack-a-mole to try to change folks? Like how did you think about that as you grew the personnel inside the company?
Brandon Card:yeah, that, that was a definitely a challenge as well because in the beginning when we were recruiting sales reps, we didn't have unlimited, budget to throw and pay these people massive salaries like Amazon and like Salesforce and like the Microsofts of the world. we knew. Even day one, before we hired our first sales rep, that we need enterprise experienced sales reps that have lived in this world. So we wanted to find people that worked at Oracle, people that worked at IBM, people that worked at Microsoft, people that worked at Salesforce that were supporting big global enterprises and understood that customers paid millions and millions of dollars for software and services and have that perception of the world. So that's one thing we did is really focused on going to get enterprise experienced sellers. That have done seven and eight figure deals throughout their career. Now the challenge is, is those people are really hard to recruit early on because they require big base salaries and big on targets of course. And they deserve it because they drive revenue. So we had to make some adjustments and to say, okay, we're gonna have to get guys that are a little more junior to so we can afford them, and then we're gonna train them on the enterprise motion, I'll be the first one to admit was a complete failure. Complete shit show.
Dan Balcauski:What happened?
Brandon Card:And we brought in people that had, great people, honestly, great DNA great high energy people that just didn't have any experience selling to big enterprises. And they struggled super hard to figure out how to get into these companies, how to have conversations with them, how to qualify pipeline, how to even generate real pipeline in this segment. And we realized, wow, we'd have to build a massive enablement organization
Dan Balcauski:Is lemme just ask real quickly, is that even with the. The first round filter of these folks came from the IBM or the Oracle world. Like they still struggled'cause they were earlier in their career.
Brandon Card:so, to be clear we, only got a few people that had the IBM Oracle type of experience Because the market was too competitive and It was too costly to bring in these senior folks. So then we decide, okay, we still need to hire some reps. We're gonna go bring in some people that are a little more junior that had success in mid-market companies
Dan Balcauski:I got it.
Brandon Card:and enterprise SaaS. And then we brought in those, those people crushed it. I saw their, I saw their stats and I saw what they did at companies. They came into Terzo and it was like, wow, this is a whole different game. I have no idea how to talk to a finance leader at a Fortune 500 company. Wow. I have no idea. Customers pay$20 million a year for software. they're try. They're transactional. They're thinking like, oh, I gotta get, three deals done a month and I'll do this deal on the. credit card for 12 grand. I thought, wow, there's a huge learning curve here. I didn't, I underestimated how big of a learning curve it is. So then we went through a restructuring in the summer of 23, 1 of the hardest times of my life, honestly, two years ago, and I just blew up the entire sales org and the biz dev org and said, Nope, we're starting over from scratch. Even if we have less people, we're only getting enterprise. Experienced people. And that was one of the epiphanies I had. And that's what I learned, is that you can't really bring mid-market s and b people in and think that you're gonna train them in a remote world and they're gonna get up and running and understand how to sell the enterprise. So we realized, okay, instead of going out and hiring six people that are you, high volume, really good, we're gonna go get two people that can drive really complex deals and go wide and deep into accounts. And that's still where we're at right now. If you look at our sales team. We just brought over a gentleman who's been at Microsoft for eight or nine years supporting Fortune 500 customers, right? I brought over a services seller that the same thing. So that's our strategy and how we change, and that's how we're gonna continue to change in the next, couple years here as we raise more capital is we're gonna bring in people that have a ton of experience in the enterprise segment.
Dan Balcauski:Got it. So the. I'm just trying to place in time was that layer of actually we do need folks from the Oracles of the world. The learning during that sort of round two. I, and I guess my follow on question is, I guess was there anything besides big company logo that you learned? Was it like a sniff test for like interviews? I'm just imagining like a lot of other founders, CEOs try to in the same position. You don't have unlimited capital. You can't you can't spend these big dollars on some of these big whale hunters. Right off the bat, Are there things that you learned besides, I think at Oracle on the resume, that like you could sniff out in interviews, questions you would ask to really detect?
Brandon Card:that's a great question, Dan. That's a really great question. To be very clear about our, journey. After we got our first series A done we did two tranches of the series A,'cause the markets were chaos, we got a big round of capital in the business. We went out and hired a bunch of people,
Dan Balcauski:Mm-hmm.
Brandon Card:And that's when we realized, oh wow, we made some mistakes.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah.
Brandon Card:then we said, okay, wait, we're gonna trim these people. And then we had still had some capital left. We went out and fixed it at the end of 23, heading into 24. We learned. Made some mistakes, failed quick, and then we changed course and went out and hired people. So if we couldn't get enterprise people we have one gentleman on the team that's absolutely crushing it that doesn't have any enterprise experience, but the one trait that I look for as a CEO and a leader, I was looking for long term patient people. That was the one trait I was looking for in the interviews was, do these people want instant gratification? Because a lot of people do, and it has nothing to do with their background or experience. A lot of people want instant gratification. It's just how their brains work. Or are these some other folks, are they willing to work three years for a deal? Do they have that level of patience and that level of long-term vision to actually go through a sales cycle for three years, but not just sales cycle, anything? Are they willing to work out? For seven years to get results. Are they willing to diet and, change their whole entire, nutritional program? And I was starting to dig into other parts of their life to see other decisions. Do they have long-term relationships? Are they married, right? All those types of things. How are these people see the world? Because the challenge we have, and I know that other founders feel this too, we live in a world where I could go downstairs tonight, in my little hack away room, build an application, and then next weekend it's got 14 million followers and I'm super rich and I'm a hero. And that's what, that's the world everyone lives in. Or I do a YouTube video and it goes viral. Next thing you know, I'm famous, right? Overnight success, lottery bullshit, all this short term, instant gratification, nonsense that, that we live in. And, and I don't blame these people, right? You're a female. You can go on only fans and make 50 KA month by showing, yourself in a bathing suit. It's ridiculous, right? The world has given you all this opportunity to go make money overnight. And honestly, it's the biggest facade and a bunch of bullshit that I've ever seen in my life. nothing good happens in a short amount of time. All the beautiful things in life take time, right? All the beautiful things in life. So when I realized that, wow, a lot of these people, they're short term thinkers. They want to, get rich quick overnight. This is not gonna work for us. I don't care if they can sell the enterprise or not. So I started to look at people's, thought process and I started to spend time with'em in person and do lunches and dinners and really spend time with'em and thinking about how do you see the world? Are you willing to, are you willing to grind? For 3, 4, 5 years before you get your first big commission check.'cause I was right and I had to, back then I didn't get, I didn't get into a big sales rep role, my first job outta college. I had to work for years and prove myself to get in those roles. So that was the one thing I was constantly looking for. Long-term thinkers versus short-term thinkers. And I can tell you, I've done studies all over the world with different people. If you look at the population, Dan, and they did a Stanford marshmallow study on this too. 75% to 80% of the human beings on this earth in that range are short-term thinkers. So that leaves you about 20% of the population is the long-term thinkers. So that really disqualifies the pool of people, and that's one thing I continue to do now, even for hiring for engineering, or hiring for marketing, or hiring for, finance. It doesn't matter. I'm thinking about, I want long-term people on this journey with me because that's the only way we're gonna win.
Dan Balcauski:The business marshmallow test. I love it. And I I think the shortest executive or the shortest C-suite executive in tech is the CMOA year and a half. But I think most sales reps don't even last that. Most companies too. So if you're planning on job hopping every 12 months, And you're not gonna hit your first commission check sell in this really complex thing for three years. I can imagine that's gonna, that's gonna work against you in that filtering as well.
Brandon Card:quick story for one of our sales reps. He's our first sales rep, Spencer, right? Incredible guy.
Dan Balcauski:Shout out Spencer.
Brandon Card:so Spencer, yeah, he's incredible. I'm proud of him. So proud of him. But I made him a promise. I said to him, Hey, you come in. He came in April of 2021 and I said, my friend, I'm a very transparent CEO. I'm not gonna lie to you. gonna take years for you to make big money here. We're just building the company now. We're in the seed stage. not gonna get big commission checks right away, but I promise you. If you work hard, you're patient, you're focused, you do the right things, you act with integrity, you act with honesty. You treat everyone fairly. You are going to make a lot of money, probably year three or year four, being very real with you. Probably not gonna be year two or year three, right? Year three, year four, if I had to guess. And he said to me, wow, that's a really hard thing to hear. And I said I, I just wanna be honest with you. He said expectations because this is the type of, world we're living in now. But you signed up for this. I wanna make sure you're we're on the same page. He said. You know what? I'm willing to wait as long as the reward is big enough. And I said, you know what? If you do all the right things, that reward will be big enough. Here we are, 2025. Spent four years been on board with Terzo. He is going to make more money this year, then 99.9% of sales reps in and I'm so proud of him his patience. And doing all the right things. But he had in his head the whole time, Dan, gonna take me a long time to get that big commission check. It's gonna take me a long time. But guess what, he brought that energy to customer meetings. He brought that energy to internal meetings, patience and consistency and he was very methodical with how he did things. And when I see that and I also, I see that he's gonna go this reward now, it brings a lot of happiness. To my heart, I remember having that conversation four years ago, and I remember how disappointed I was in myself to have that conversation with him.'cause I'm thinking to myself like, how can I tell a sales rep he can't make a lot of money for three or four years? It's ridiculous. but that was the truth, because I never wanna lie, I never ever wanna mislead or lie to my people because then I lose trust. I remember he said to me, geez, man, that was a tough conversation to hear. But he stuck it out. And I'm, I wanna reward him so much for that. But that's just a story for other people out there too, because. All the beautiful things in life take time, and that's what a lot of people learn, whether you're in this business or many other things in life.
Dan Balcauski:Man. There's so many topics. I we're closing up on time, so I'm not gonna have time to, to touch on all of it, in the world of patience. I am, I do wanna click on you are selling something that as you illuminated at the beginning of our conversation was not. Necessarily a line item. You're not replacing like their existing cybersecurity tool or their existing like ERP system. It's something new. Layer onto that. There's AI is the hypest of hype cycles ever and Fortune 500, fortune 100 and the office of the CFO are not particularly hypey people. I'm curious what you've learned about that conflation of factors of selling to a traditionally risk averse buyer with a incredibly bleeding edge technology. Into a problem set that they don't have budget spend today. Like I, what have you learned in that whole unholy triumvirate like to, for, to be successful?
Brandon Card:Anytime. And I, I laugh'cause I'm like the next company. I go start, I'm definitely going after an existing budget that's already there. I'm not gonna go create new budget because that's what we had to do at Turso and that's what a lot of our friends listening probably have to go do. We had to go create new budget line item, which means we needed to go figure out what stakeholders in the business are going to create the business case and stick their neck out there and take that risk and say. need new budget for a new solution because of this problem we have. that is a very hard thing to do. And because these companies, it doesn't matter, right? These companies have massive committees of people creating budget. And if it's not already there and you want to create it for next year, you're gonna get a lot of scrutiny. So the first thing we realize is that even if people love us, Dan, even if people love you overall and your product, and they're nice people. Are they bold enough and are they enough to go even submit the business case for new budget?'cause that's not easy because these people work in massive corporations. Their natural behavior is, their actions are to not get fired, to be a maverick and go out there and say, Hey, I wanna bring in a new solution. No one's ever heard of. They're like, oh, that's high risk. That's really, interesting. You wanna do that? I wanna need a million dollars for it too. So we zeroed in and we said. Who are the type of people that will actually do this? We found our Mavericks, right? We call'em Mavericks. At Terzo, we found Mavericks in these different companies that wanted to be the innovator. They wanted to be the data guru. They wanted to go to the CFO office and say, Hey, I have a new solution for you. Wait till you see what I got for you. So we identified those characters. We didn't even look at companies. We were looking at characters that we would meet at events and conferences and we'd say, and we'd see what companies have brought in New Tech before.'cause those are the type of characters we wanted to deal with. So when we were trying to figure out how to create budget from scratch, we were oftentimes going after people that we knew had the personality types to go take this risk and create the budget cases. Because even though we're a solution that could help you save money and was very straightforward, filling the problem that everyone knew go create budget for next year for AI line item was very hard. You needed a whole committee to say yes to this. So we were always trying to figure out who is the person that will actually go present to the committee when we're not in the room
Dan Balcauski:Yeah.
Brandon Card:sales are won and lost when you are not in the room. That is the truest thing I've said on this podcast the whole time. We can say as much as we want to our stakeholder, but as soon as they go to that internal meeting and we're not in the meeting, they're selling for us. And it's really difficult to go arm those people to go sell your solution for you when you're not in the room and build a business case and a budget. But they have to really have some incentive to do it. They have to either want to get promoted, wanna be known as the, the guru of the organization, have this chip on their shoulder, an ego about, being the smartest person. We those type of people to figure out how to go create budget and. We learned a lot about how to do that over the last couple years. And then now, I'm not gonna name the financial company for confidentiality purposes, but one of the biggest financial companies in the world. We have some great relationships over there. They told us we're not gonna have budget for AI until 2027 or 28. And we said, really? And they said, yeah, we're not going to no matter what. Why? Because our board and our CFO and everyone decided it's too risky. We don't need it. It's not gonna impact the business enough. No budget for that. Okay, perfect. Done. That happens all the time. We also went to so many customers that we knew well, prospects, they told us we're not gonna have budget for ai, have budget for ai. Okay, perfect. Disqualify you. And then there's other companies that said, oh, we can create budget. So that was another thing we were doing with our propensity mapping, right? Our sales propensity maps. Figuring out what companies are not gonna get AI budget, no matter what financial services, oil and gas logistics companies. You see a lot of trends, right? Which companies are gonna be able to at least submit budget, retail, tech, consumer goods, all these type of companies. So then we started getting the propensity mapping down to see what companies can we go target to create new budget. And that was the majority of the work that myself and the sales team were doing.
Dan Balcauski:I love that idea of, Finding the personality within the person versus this focus on the account. And obviously you've layered that in there with, industry and purchase patterns of other technology. But I think that's a really key insight there. Man, there's so much I wanted to talk to you but We are running up on time. Yeah, yeah. We'll get we'll invite you back for round two sometime. Brandon, this has been great. If folks wanna learn more about Terzo, wanna follow you around the internet any place you wanna send them to.
Brandon Card:Yeah, I would say my LinkedIn, i'm pretty active on LinkedIn. It's the only social channel I'm probably on every day. But LinkedIn is where I post a lot of stuff about the company, a lot of my personal stuff on mental health and, conscious culture and being good leaders and making sure that we're, changing the way things are in this new world we're in. And I appreciate anyone that, that follows me and supports me on LinkedIn.
Dan Balcauski:I will put the link in the show notes as well as a link to torso's website for our listeners, everyone that wraps up this episode of Sask GA Secrets. Thank you Brandon for sharing his journey and insights. For our listeners, you found Brandon's insights valuable. Please leave a review and share this episode with the network. It really helps the podcast grow.
