Join us in a very special episode as we sit down with David Tal, CEO and co-founder of Verse.ai. Dive into David’s journey from UCLA to founding an AI-driven customer engagement platform, driven by his ambition to position San Diego as a hub for tech and innovation. Discover how he navigated the 2008 housing crisis to innovate in real estate and tech, the impact of AI and SMS in business communication, and adapting to a remote-first work culture. Daniel and David also explore the recent FCC changes regarding lead generation and offer valuable advice for business leaders. Tune in for a blend of personal stories and professional insights in the ever-evolving tech landscape.
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Cross: Hello, and welcome to 73 and Sunny, the podcast about the journey of getting things just right. We talk to tech sales and marketing leaders about how they’re growing, dialing in best practices and getting closer to that sweet spot. With us today is a very special guest, the master of puns. Prevair of fist bumps, captain of the Verse ship, CEO and co-founder of Verse.Ai, David Tal. Welcome to the podcast,
David: David. Thanks, Daniel. Thanks for having me. Big fan of the show.
Cross: Thanks. One of our many fans. You are looking fantastic today. You look great.
David: Thank you. You’re a great eyesight.
Cross: The camera’s far away. I should say it’s a little blurry too. So maybe a lot of contributing factors there.
I’m really excited to have you on the show. Obviously a lot of insights for the world of AI and also for the world of conversion. And I’d really like to just dive into how you started Verse. Give me a little background on who you are or where you came from and what got you into this.
David: Sure. So I I actually went, I went to UCLA for electrical engineering originally. And. Throughout a course of events switched to economics, ended up in real estate looking to looking to get into development and the housing market crashed in kind of 08 and and I was stuck with my real estate license and not a lot to do in developing new real estate.
And and so I became a, an agent, a real estate agent and started to grow my own practice. Eventually hired I became a broker and I hired agents that worked for me and I wanted to grow my business. And so I started investing in lead sources like Zillow and realtor. com and homes. com and driving Google traffic to my website, et cetera, to generate leads, home buyer and seller leads.
And I would hand those leads off to my real estate agents. And I very quickly realized and found out that they didn’t do a very good job of following up with every one of those leads that I was, spending money to generate for them. And I would find out that they would maybe call them one time and then give up or move on to the next lead.
They would leave a voicemail. They would send an email. Maybe my good ones would no one was really texting. And I realized very quickly that there was a real kind of gap in how how businesses and any one man business even would go about customer engagement and engaging their own prospects and nurturing them and following up with them.
And so I started studying a bit more on that and what was needed. And I found that it took six to eight attempts to get ahold of the majority of prospects, but most of my agents were only making one attempt, maybe two. And quickly realized that there’s probably a better way, there’s got to be a better way, and I thought if we can help automate some of this out we could create a far better experience.
And so we. We decided to, I joined forces with my brother Avi who had just graduated at the time from from university as well. And he had a tech background and marketing background, and we decided to tackle this for first firsthand. And so we created a platform that helped.
Realtors following, follow up with their prospects and really automate that process and leverage the power of SMS in particular to do so because, most people were just making phone calls or sending emails and those were important channels, but every year they were losing efficacy and value today, fast forward to today, and only 13 percent of phone calls are answered, only 22 percent of emails are ever opened. But 98 percent of text messages are not just opened, but read and within a few minutes, within three minutes. And so It’s the most powerful engagement communication channel.
And so we brought that to the forefront of our engagement strategy and create a platform where where agents originally just real estate agents, how we started could connect their lead sources. And we would automatically initiate followup sequences over text to engage, qualify. Those homebuyer and seller prospects and book appointments and showings and and such for them.
So those are the beginning days when we were working with, more SMBs.
Cross: Yeah. And so in all transparency I’ve known David for almost seven years, six and a half years, something like that. I’ve been working with. So I know about the history but I thought it was fascinating being a part of a business that was San Diego has always been a big San Diego tech has been a big part of your passion, building out, a team downtown and really trying to put San Diego on the map for being a tech, a tech Haven and, I also remember when we all left the office and went home in 2020 on March 6th or whatever it was, I I remember it because I was going to a conference on right when the news was starting to hit and I was headed up and I was driving to San Clemente and my wife said, are you sure you should go?
And this is when all the news was coming out and I was like, yeah, I think so. Every everything, this is, it’s probably overhyped or whatever. And I go, you know what, I think I’m going to stop at the dollar store and just grab some hand sanitizer. Just so when I go to this conference, I’ll be able to I’ll be able to feel, somewhat safe.
And I went into the dollar store and it looked like apocalypse, like the shelves were empty and all the hand sanitizers, it was completely gone. And toilet paper was gone. And I found like this tiny little one on a shelf, and I was like, this might actually be something, this might actually be something, and by the time I got back two days later, there was a, there was, a scare, somebody, a relative of somebody had gotten COVID, and we were going to evacuate the offices, I remember being a part of it, but I wanted to ask what was it like in the transition moving from office to home now, San Diego being, as a tech center still being important, but now having a distributed workforce across the country what was it like to run a company during COVID and the transition back from the office to, to the home?
David: Yeah, it was like so many that went through that transition, it was. It’s scary in its own way very uncertain times. Our business was grinding to a halt for the kind of couple of months right after, Tom Hanks and all the dominoes and, falling and everyone freaking out.
Especially Tom Hanks. Yeah. Tom Hanks ruined it for everybody. And Some would say he was an outcast but he and he was cast away. But and we weren’t really sure what was going to happen. Our business was slowing down. First and foremost, we were like concerned for the health of our employees and our own families, of course.
And at the same time trying to juggle, what are we going to do? No one is taking sales calls right now. Everyone’s trying to figure out what they’re going to do with their own businesses. And so there was twofold, right? Not just like operationally, but from the business dynamic, what’s going to happen.
And we, we took the route of being more conservative and saying, let’s assume this is going to last longer than we think. And let’s leave the office. And so we were one of the first to leave the office and go home. And look, we had such an incredible culture in person. That it was, as and remember, the water cooler talk that, all the fun stuff we had at the office.
And I, I love going around saying hi to one, 100 percent of the team every morning and going to lunch with you guys. And it was really important to us that as we all scattered home, that we somehow figured out a way to keep that tight knit culture and remain close as much as we could.
So I think that was top of mind, how do we keep that culture? Because we knew if we could keep that, a strong tree with strong roots. Can weather any storm the, a few leaves may fall off during a big windy storm, but the tree will stand through it if it, if its roots are strong and it’ll regrow those branches and leaves.
And so
Cross: it was, that’s why every single morning you drive to everyone’s house and fist bump everyone in the company still to this day.
David: Exactly. I drive to 22 States now, but I always make it home for dinner. Cause that’s important to me and my family. So yes so yeah, it was definitely an interesting time for sure.
Cross: Yeah. And moving from having to have managing in person to managing work from home how do you feel like versus done? What are some of the lessons that you’ve learned? Do you ever consider coming back or being partly back in office?
David: The main difference I found was not having to wear pants.
Just kidding. I’m wearing them. Where am I? Speak for yourself. It’s such a difference, right? I’m seeing people on a one inch square, on zoom or hopefully not Google teams, but I hope I’m not offending any Google team employees here. Not Google team Microsoft teams.
But that was a big change. I am. But one of the benefits that really came of it all, and look, I’m a massive San Diego advocate, San Diego tech advocate. I have a shirt that’s Hey, let’s put San Diego on the map. And and if I have a shirt, it’s really important. That’s what part of the ecosystem here there’s a culture into its, into itself in that regard.
But one of the benefits of going remote was we were now able to start hiring people everywhere. It didn’t actually matter that they were just in San Diego. And by the way, there’s incredible talent in San Diego, but there’s incredible talent everywhere. And this allowed us to tap into different markets and different different people that were perfect for different kinds of roles.
Whether they were in San Diego or not, and we’ve hired people in San Diego and we’ve hired people and now, I think we’re in 20 something states. And that’s been wonderful. At the same time, that’s going to make it harder to ever bring it all back together.
And so I think we’re committed as a company now to being a remote first company, making that work. And as we have a lot of, a kind of cultural elements and events that, that keep us close together. You’re a trivia master. We do trivia. We do all sorts of games. We do, costume contests and pizza nights and all that kind of stuff.
We do all hands. And at the same time where I used to lead all hands in person and it was, a powwow, we’ve had to really translate that to, a presentation format on zoom essentially. And that’s made me rethink what we share, how much we share. And I think now we actually share more than ever before because it’s compensating for.
Not having that energy in person where people understand you, you talk more to everybody all the time. And so in turn we’ve decided to be even more transparent. As we’ve been apart to hopefully bind us all as much together as we can.
Cross: I think that’s really interesting because you’re talking about trust and, in, in person, you’re able to establish those.
There’s body language, there’s just inherent trust and being on a mission with someone else that you don’t get necessarily through zoom interactions, but you might, so being more being more transparent about where we are as a company, you have to do a little bit more to, to keep the trust built.
And I think that’s a really interesting point you’re, you also went through, versus gone through some challenges and moving from. S from SMB from where you started with smaller businesses and moving upstream, and when I say gone through some challenges, like any transition you’ve had a lot of success in moving from SMB to upstream and to enterprise level.
What lessons did you learn from when you moved from an SMB focused business to an enterprise focused business?
David: Yeah. So great question. We knew we wanted to move upstream for all sorts of reasons. We wanted to have, as big of an impact as we could. And instead of, trying to work with one realtor at a time, we said, why don’t we try to work with the platforms that send them all their business.
And we could do, smart from a business decision, but smart from an impact perspective. And so we knew we wanted to move upstream and out to multiple industries. We learned a lot on the way I’d never sold to mid market or enterprise or public companies before. And we were used to selling kind of man to man, woman to woman and just selling to the owner essentially, right? And if you think about signing up a real estate agent, that real estate agent is a one man or woman business, right? And they make the decisions on kind of everything. And that’s a very different type of sell than when you’re selling into a marketing team at a mass or massive organization.
It’s a different set of, it’s a different persona you’re really speaking to. And so we had to learn how to adapt and how to point out the different value propositions that were important to different personas, whether it be. Ahead of sales that we’re that we’re trying to sell into to help them see value in how we help their sales team run more efficiently and effectively and spend their time more wisely on, on warm opportunities or how we speak to a persona in marketing where we’re trying to say, Hey, you’re generating all these leads and sales isn’t responding to them quickly enough or often enough, or what do they do at night, weekends, we can help you turn these, better.
MQLs into SQLs at a higher clip. And you can yield more of your marketing dollars and therefore spend more and spend it wisely or where we’re selling to a kind of customer engagement, operational yeah, a person who’s in charge of kind of the whole customer experience. And we’re trying to prove our value and how we actually are lifting.
Lifting the experience throughout. And so that was a big change and part of maturing. And then of course, from a legal perspective, it’s very different, working with much bigger organizations or billion dollar public companies with big legal and privacy teams and check boxes, it forced us to get smarter, get wiser, get more compliant and make sure that we were.
Above and beyond their expectations so that whenever we had those opportunities come across, we were ready to go. We were, ready to have that signed off and we weren’t learning on the go anymore, which we did in the beginning. And lastly, I think it’s important that we had to build a system for enterprise grade compliance, SMS, and it’s.
On its own, has it as a world of regulation layered on top of it compliance from the carriers, from the providers, from, federal regulations, and it’s something we’ve had to stay on top of and now have, a team around care, care relations. And it’s something that we’ve had to stay on top of because.
A realtor may have 50 or a hundred or 500 people we need to talk to on their behalf or text on their behalf a month. A big public company may have a hundred thousand or more or millions. And we need to have a system that can handle that scale and that could handle having proper reliability with the delivery of all those millions of messages a month.
And so it really forces to grow up technologically compliance and kind of from a legal perspective and as a sales organization, really mature how we’re presenting and pitching and even how we’re finding the right people. At each of those organizations, it’s very different than, Hey, I found Bob Jones, Realtor, Bob, John, I found him.
He’s on every first cell sign. I know his info. How do you get the info of the right person at a company with a thousand people or 5, 000 people? How do you find the right person you need to actually talk to there? That’s a much steeper hill that takes more research and maturity of a team to know how to navigate a bigger organization.
Cross: Yeah. And even focusing on the pain points of an SMB versus at the enterprise level, an SMB pain point might be quite simply we’re feeling overwhelmed. We’re not able to get to leads in a certain amount of time. And so we feel like this system could be better versus the enterprise where they’re saying, if we can reduce.
Labor costs by 10 percent and increased overall engagement, by 5%, the overall revenue increase is going to be amazing. And so all the pain points that you’re looking for really become more honed in as you move into the enterprise. And actually there, there might be one point pain point that you can solve that makes a significant difference to their business versus the SMB where.
It might, they might just be looking for help from drowning. They’re just looking for a life ring. So you’re it’s interesting that you point that out, that everything obviously becomes more complex. The number of stakeholders increases, but also just in general the pain points that they’re looking to solve, just they change, right?
There’s just a lot more variation.
David: And to your point, because of their scale it’s a much more data driven conversation and data driven results analysis, as opposed to more kind of emotional reaction to how things are going at a small scale. At a big scale, it’s like they’re looking at statistics and, lift percentages.
Hey you increased conversions by X percent that results in millions of dollars more. And this small lift here trickles down to that much more revenue or savings or time saved. At scale the data and the insights are really meaningful and have more impact. And at the end of the day, impact is, one of the key words that, that was important to us.
Cross: So one of the reasons why they the, we’re able to have versus able to have such a big impact is the use of ai. So I wanted to jump into the topic of ai. It’s at the end of the verse business URL. It’s a big part of the business. I wanted to get your take on how the verse mission, your mission has evolved since.
Open a OpenAI, launched chat. GPT, on, I’ll reframe the question because I know that the way that the rest of the world experienced chat, GPT when it first came out, like everyone was saying, oh my God, we’re gonna be able to use this for everything. We’re gonna be able to replace all, everything’s gonna get ex.
Like way cheaper, right? Your ability to create content, your ability to write emails, labor costs are going to go down because all these tasks are being automated and they’re going to be, you’re going to be able to use it for every, anything you’re writing in terms of content. And then those businesses are coming into the marketplace and looking for.
Tools that will incorporate the AI and are potentially, surprised at how maybe to the extent that they’re not able to use AI, directly in, in the way that they, you know, an email written exclusively by AI might. Might not be might not come across with the same brand voice and might not sound like you and you’re still having to do a lot of editing.
So I wanted to get your take on how the verse mission has evolved since open AI launched chat GPT.
David: Yeah. Our mission from the beginning has been to help businesses create more authentic and delightful experiences for their customers. That mission has not changed. The tools by which we get there and are able to deliver that experience for consumers and businesses has changed and will continue to change and evolve.
And we’ve been an AI company for a decade. We’ve been. Tapping into the earliest iterations of AI working with working with, the Amazon, Google and meta AI systems and platforms for many years. And ChatGPT is just the next iteration of that with generative AI.
And now, you have the same from other providers as well, Google and others and many others that are coming out. And so to us, it’s another tool in the tool belt of how we do that. Notice our mission isn’t to help every business text, right? Our mission is to help businesses create the most authentic engagement and experiences for their, for the customers.
And we use text. Texting because we believe that we can combine the best technology out there, which today is AI and automation with the best, most effective and impactful communication channels led by SMS. And we do email as well and some other channels we’re omni channel, but we’re heavy on SMS.
As a result, because it’s effective, if tomorrow that changes will change. If there’s a better way to engage with customers, that’s going to be our mission. And so AI is just going to help us do that better. Now I agree. I think the best way to leverage chat GPT and other platforms like that.
It is today for content creation. I think that’s really the primary use case today. I think there’s a lot of businesses like ours and others that can leverage it in a much more meaningful deep way to improve what we’re already doing. And so absolutely it’s improving what we’re doing. It’s making our conversations even more authentic.
It’s enabling us to provide unique experiences that we’re now building that weren’t as easily available to create before. So it’s a net positive for us and I think anyone else in the space to be able to leverage that as we were able to leverage other technology in the past, but our, the way I look at what we’re really doing is how do we leverage AI and put it into practical business and engagement practices?
Our focus is helping businesses connect with their customers. How do we leverage, AI to create authentic conversation, but what are the channels that we’re powering to make that possible? And to enable businesses to leverage, like to be able to leverage SMS at scale with high deliverability and compliance and be able to deliver that experience and to stay on top of not just.
What is here today, but what will continue to come out and evolve, tomorrow and every month and a half, there’s a new GPT three point something, four point four point something, it’s going to keep evolving. I don’t know if businesses want to stay on top of that themselves. They haven’t done that with email or phone systems, right?
They rely on. Marketing automation platforms that stay on top of that. And I think the same for SMS and other communication channels, they’re going to rely on platforms like Versa and others that can help them achieve that and stay on top of that technology platform and foundation.
Cross: Yeah, that’s a great point in that being focused on the mission.
The mission is not how do we incorporate AI into our business? It’s the mission should remain the same with a subheading of how, how do we get there? And if we can use AI to get there. All the power to us and probably a better product, but staying roadmap of the vision of it’s not about, it’s not about making AI the focus it’s about how do we use it?
David: Absolutely. And, but I do think that it’s an interesting time right now because every. Every boardroom around the country is asking their founders, how are we going to leverage AI? And even if they don’t fully understand it, they know it’s powerful and can save them money. And right now every company is asking themselves, how can we use AI to save money or automate things that we would normally have to hire more staff for or to do things better and more authentically.
And services like Verse and others. Our solutions that are leveraging those technologies in powerful ways with real applications for those businesses to be able to leverage and say, this is a perfect way to do that, right? And with our own business metrics, our customers see time saved money saved and money made, right?
This is, we tap into the full spectrum of business impact that we have on every customer. To show them those metrics precisely, whether it was AI driving it or automation or regular machine learning or anything else. Ultimately, I think what’s important to them is the results, not even the how, but the results.
Yeah.
Cross: So I’m going to segue because as a part of the SMS portion of how leads how verse helps customers connect Businesses connect with their customers via SMS. Part of that process is getting consent from consumers to reach out. Maybe the audience may or may not know it’s it’s a complicated world out there for texting customers there that there’s there are rules regarding T.
- P. A. Compliance where businesses have to get consent and express written consent and opt in from their customers before they’re able to send texts on that’s all regulated by the F. C. And something big happened last week. The F. C. Staff circulated a proposed rule that would close the lead generator loophole.
And what is the lead generator loophole? I can go into it a little bit. Essentially there are a lot of businesses out there online who are aggregators or where people, consumers can go to, let’s say, compare like four or five different, loan rates or. Quotes for services, let’s say a roof where they can look at, five different roofers after they go through a brief question questionnaire and there’s a loophole right now where if you clicks.
That you give consent or you confirm consent at the end of that form. There’s a little blue link that, that if you follow it, the terms and conditions, the one that nobody ever reads, there might be a list of 10, 000 other businesses that the the website that you’ve just submitted your information on, that they can share your information and your data with.
And that. That’s been targeted by the FCC as being something that’s negative for consumers. Really they’re looking at trying to stop robocalls. They want to have consumers less bombarded by trying to get information on one product when And that company sharing your data with a thousand others and so really briefly what the FCC said is we now make it unequivocally clear that texters and callers must obtain a consumer’s prior express written consent from a single seller at a time on the comparison shopping websites that are often the source of lead generation, thus closing the lead generator loophole.
Requiring one to one consent will end the current practice of consumers receiving robocalls and robotexts from tens or hundreds of sellers, numbers that most reasonable consumers would not expect to receive. So essentially what they’re saying is, The ability for websites to now get your consent one time and sell your data to lots of different companies is going to end.
And you’re only going to be able, these businesses or these lead generators are only going to be able to generate one to one, meaning you’re going to opt in for a specific company to get outreach from them and not to all of the partners that they. That they work with as well. David, what do you make of this proposed rule change, assuming that it does go into effect?
I think they vote on December 13th, but it’s expected to go through and get implemented next year. What do you make of this proposed rule change?
David: I think it’s really positive for the consumer experience. I don’t think any consumer wants to be. Filling out a form thinking they’re going to get information from one company and their information be shared and co registered, sold to dozens of others.
And all of a sudden they’re getting calls and texts from numbers they don’t know and people they didn’t expect. So I think it’s a really positive positive change that, that should pass. It’s going to, it’s going to certainly get rid of a lot of spam and look, we want to protect the communication channels that are the most effective.
And texting is a super effective communication channel, but if it gets abused by fraud and spammers, it’ll lose impact. And I think this is super positive. It’s going to get rid of so much of that and allow it to become a much more, clear channel where consumers who fill out a form and say, I want to be contacted by text.
can receive a tax from that company and not have to worry about other information being sold and passed out to many others. And by the way, when there’s more trust from the consumers, they’re going to fill out more forms. Right now, so many people don’t fill out forms or there’s always a hesitation.
What am I about to, what am I about to do? I know the moment I fill this out, I’m going to get bombarded. The moment, and it’s going to take a while but when there’s more trust there, I think it’s going to create a much brighter future for the customer engagement landscape. So I. I fully support that move.
Cross: And I think another, I totally agree. And I think another side effect might be that if you’re picking at the end, let’s say you get to the end of a funnel where you’ve indicated that you’re interested in a certain thing. If you’re picking who you want to hear from, I think one.
One of the benefits is that they’re going to be expecting something from you right then. And so rather than having four text messages appear and maybe not knowing not even recognizing the names of some of them, that there, there might be a feeling of, I’m just going to ignore it. Completely, I’m going to ignore all of them because I didn’t want any of this and maybe I’ll look into it on a, maybe I’ll go to another website and look into it somewhere else.
And maybe I’ll make the phone call rather than getting bombarded. So now that people are going to be specifically saying, I want to hear from so and so mortgage company, or I want to hear from this solar company that they’ll be more receptive to response. Even, the engagement rates for businesses that are just calling or even sending automated text messages, like they’re lucky to get over 40 or 50 percent response rates.
So that means half the people who just filled out forms are being unresponsive, which is, should be unacceptable. I’m wondering if this rule change is going to change that.
David: I agree. And I think, one of the problems with phone calls and obviously phone calls are important, but one of the problems with phone calls when you just fill out a form is you don’t know who it is and they’re calling you at whatever time is convenient to them, not to you which could be that minute or it could be an hour later.
It could be the next day. It’s when they’re ready, not when you’re ready as a consumer. And I think what’s so powerful about texts and why we’ve really taken the route of being, text first. Customer engagement company is immediately when you get a text right after filling out a form, you can say, Hey, this is Alex with blank company.
You just inquired about happy to connect with you or get you in touch with the right person or set up that appointment or send you that information or get you that quote. Let me ask you a couple of quick questions. You can get right into a conversation and say, by the way, do you prefer a call? Happy to call you whenever it’s convenient.
Or hey, when is a good time for a call? We need to hop on a call to, to help you. What’s the best time to call? The best time to call is text. It’s text first, because now they know who it is, what it’s about, and they can tell you when it’s convenient for them for that phone call.
And the moment that companies recognize that it’s about connecting with consumers on their time and on their communication channel of preference and on their terms that is when the entire journey just improves immediately. Not when you’re trying to guess when they’re going to pick up the phone.
And even if they pick it up, they’re like, Oh, I thought it was someone else. I got the kids with me, or I can’t answer right now. I’m hopping into another meeting, call me later. And that was just wasted time, wasted effort, maybe wasted opportunity entirely. Or you’re calling them 50 times until they pick up and they finally pick up and they say, you got me.
But buzz off and never call me again, call me 80 times. It’s absurd, right? As opposed to one text that says everything they need to know and allows them to respond on their time and terms. And you can sell them a little followup reminder, but that experience is much more effective and less and much more frictionless than the alternatives today,
Cross: Building on that, it also makes it so much more important as the business.
Who is the exclusive owner of this person who’s just given consent that the outreach be, sensitive and consumer driven and other, because it’s not going to any competitors. Now, you really have to get in touch with them quickly because there’s no law against them going back again to that website, filling out another form, getting connected with someone else.
And making first contact and doing it in a way that’s consumer driven is more important than ever. This is the segment of our podcast, David, that we call if I were you, where you give advice to the head of sales or business leaders on something they should be doing. So address the audience, start with, if I were you.
David: All right. I’ll speak to, I’ll speak to really anyone. This could be a founder. It could be a head of sales. It could be a head of success. It could be a head of marketing. If I were you, I would spend a lot of time experiencing your own service or products experience yourself. We’ve been guilty of this ourselves and I know a lot of others who do the same.
They’re so focused on. The business and growing and sales and operations and fundraising that they forget to experience their own product themselves. And, the moment we had our engineers and other people at the organization start to experience verse as a consumer themselves.
All the light bulbs went off ideas. I could fix that. I can make this way better. I’m going to save us money doing this. How about if we added this feature, we could do this is another use case. The ideas start to flow and it’s not something that we always did in such a kind of proactive way, but it’s something that I’ve really started to encourage our team for a while now to do more of to be our own customer.
Because when you do, you’re going to see the full spectrum and it’s so easy sometimes. And by the way, you could be running a sandwich shop. Doesn’t have to be a tech company. You’re focused on being on this side of the bar, making sandwiches and heating the bread and cutting the bread and slicing the turkey and et cetera.
And making sure the fridges are set right. And that’s all super important. But guess who doesn’t care about any of that? The customer on the other side who just wants to come in, make sure it’s a clean and welcoming environment, that they’re greeted in a friendly way, that their sandwich comes out right, and that it’s served warm and wrapped correctly, and that they’re You know, billing experience is easy and that they have a nice table to sit at.
If you’re too focused being behind the bar the entire time, you’re going to miss a lot of the other side. That’s actually what’s driving the business and the repeat business. And sometimes all the details in the background and the minutiae you realize are, although they’re important, they may not be as important as the other side of the experience.
My advice is be your own customer and experience it, walk into your own restaurant and order a sandwich and, take that as a metaphor for any product or service you sell.
Cross: Yeah, I’m hungry. So with that thank you so much for joining us, David. And thank you for your leadership at Verse and all the years of leadership and friendship.
Be sure to follow David Tal and Verse. ai on LinkedIn. And through the blog on their website for top notch content and conversational AI and things conversion. Thank you so much, David.
David: Thank you. Thank you, Daniel. Appreciate everything you do for us as well. Thank you.
Cross: Cheers.
