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Superhuman for Sales: Rahul Vohra, CEO of Superhuman

"Email is the most important sales technology. But email itself was never designed for sales." — Rahul Vohra

Posted by Bravado


Email is the love language of business — you can’t advance a deal without it. Sellers spend more time in email than they spend in any other tool. And, until now, there’s never been an email tool specifically designed for Sales. 

Superhuman was already the fastest email experience ever made, and now they've launched Superhuman for Sales.  Its collaborative workflows, powerful AI, and blazingly fast tools let reps work more deals and win them faster. Power users shave 12 hours off their response times and 4 hours off their work week. 

Sahil uncovers it all in the video above. Watch and listen or read the full transcript below.

Bravado members get access to Superhuman for Sales for FREE for 2 months.


Full transcript:


00:00:00:00 — 00:00:32:15
Sahil: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Bravado Interviews a really awesome founder who launches a really awesome product. This is about episode four of this that we've done, you know, and haven't done one this year, even though there's been a lot of innovation that's taking place in the sales industry, we haven't found a product that we felt like was compelling enough and was unique enough and was built with the right level of care and love and precision that merited doing one of these.

00:00:32:15 — 00:00:57:09
Sahil:
But I've known Rahul Vora, the CEO of Super Human, for a long time. Superhumans, obviously a product that is revered in the Silicon Valley for having a crazy attention to detail and a cult like following to go alongside it from from its power users. And Superhuman is announcing that they have built a product for sales, superhuman for sales.

00:00:57:11 — 00:01:04:11
Sahil:
And I was really excited to talk to Rahul about it. Thank you so much for joining me and thanks for joining the bravado community. Rahul, welcome.

00:01:04:13 — 00:01:06:24
Rahul:
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.

00:01:07:01 — 00:01:19:14
Sahil:
Yemen. So maybe you can just start and see some people here may not know what superhuman is. And maybe if you just start with what super human the original company product is and you know why you decided to build in this space. Just to give some context.

00:01:19:16 — 00:01:40:06
Rahul:
Of course, superhuman is a revolutionary email email that we've re-imagined for teams. So it works with your existing a Gmail or Outlook account. You just connect that and then you can get through your inbox twice as fast as before. Reply 12 hours sooner and save 4 hours or more every single week.

00:01:40:08 — 00:01:52:06
Sahil:
Wow. Well, first of all, that's music to the ears of any salesperson who lives in their inbox a lot. Why did you decide to focus on email as a channel that you wanted to optimize or build around?

00:01:52:08 — 00:02:13:19
Rahul:
So superhuman isn't my first company by any means. I sold my last company, which by the way, was also a sales tool. Reports of LinkedIn and linked as reports of was attempt number six or seven to start companies. It does take time. And when I started Superhuman, I wanted to solve the biggest possible problem. An email is actually way bigger than most people realize.

00:02:13:21 — 00:02:41:09
Rahul:
There are roughly 1 billion professionals in the world and on average we spend 3 hours a day reading and writing email. So that's 3000000000 hours every single day or north of 1000000000000 hours every single year that go into reading and writing email. It's actually really hard to find something that people spend more time on. I did eventually find one thing that people spend more time on than email, which is sleeping, but I had no idea how to fix that.

00:02:41:09 — 00:03:04:23
Rahul:
And I have a very clear vision on how to fix email. So we set out to build a revolutionary email experience. We want you to get through your inbox twice as fast as before to reply faster to the things that matter most, to follow up on time every time, to respond with brilliant timing and collaborate more effectively. Ultimately, the idea is to make you brilliant at what you do.

00:03:05:00 — 00:03:27:15
Sahil: You know, as a as a salesperson, you spend a lot of time in email and it's probably like, you know, on par with you. The first two skills you learn in sales are out of cold. Call on how to write a good cold emails. And I think given the rise of many of these generative AI platforms, the playing field has gotten leveled in some ways of what is the quality of an email.

00:03:27:17 — 00:04:02:09
Sahil: I remember when I first started in sales in 2008, there was no mass email to it. There was no outreach, there was no sales offer. You literally had to, heaven forbid, one at a time, write an email to somebody and then and then, you know, with the rise of things like Sales loft and Outreach Tout app, before that, I suppose there was this like new wave of email where you could send me a 1 to 100 or whatnot with personalization tokens and like that worked really effectively in 2014, 15, 16, you know, you were getting 15 20% reply rates with very little effort.

00:04:02:15 — 00:04:29:17
Sahil: But of course, like with anything that the platform got saturated, the channel got saturated, customers became aware that these types of tools weren't, were out there and, and the response rates have been going down. And quite frankly, sales teams have been really struggling over the last couple of years with cold outbound across the Provato community. We've seen that the average attainment for an SDR, the number of meetings that they can set in a month has dropped from 11.

00:04:29:17 — 00:04:50:20
Sahil: When I started the company in 2007, in 2017 it was 11 meetings per week is what an SDR was able to generate, and it is all the way down to 2.5 now and the average PR is getting 2.5 meetings a week and it's not for a lack of effort or not for a lack of desire, I think. And so I'm curious, as you think about superhuman for sales, I want to know more about it.

00:04:50:20 — 00:05:02:24
Sahil: But just before we go there, what do you think about email as a channel, as a as a as a means by which companies can do business and where things might be ahead of their.

00:05:03:01 — 00:05:28:08
Rahul: Yeah. So a lot of people say that sometimes email is dying, especially as you think about go to market channels. But I think when people say that what they're really saying is that outbound email or email prospecting is dying, just like you mentioned, and it's definitely changing very rapidly. Like you said, sales engagement platforms have spent the last ten years perfecting mass distribution and it kind of doesn't really work any longer.

00:05:28:10 — 00:05:50:24
Rahul: The net result is that outbound email is increasingly commodified, and I think it's going to be increasingly challenging to stand out. And that in turn is going to make other top of funnel tactics even more important, including trends like products like growth and product led sales. But super human for sales isn't about that. Superwoman for sales is about what happens when you already have someone interested.

00:05:50:24 — 00:06:18:16
Rahul: What happens when you're actually taking a prospect through the process of making a deal? Taking them from this is interesting too. Here's your DocuSign for that. Email is the lingua franca of business. It's how business happens, and email itself was never actually designed for salespeople. Superhuman for sales is the first email experience that ever was actually explicitly designed for salespeople.

00:06:18:18 — 00:06:44:02
Sahil: What you just said makes a tremendous amount of sense. I think that most salespeople will tell you that once you have that first conversation with a prospect, you know, you're the vast majority of how a deal gets done. It's over email. That's that's the that's the most common interface that you that you use. Can you tell us a little bit more about, you know, a superhuman for sales, what exactly it is and how it works?

00:06:44:04 — 00:07:09:12
Rahul: Yeah, absolutely. So initially the impetus was a lot of what you said, but really it isn't aimed at stores. It's aimed at sellers who are carrying closer. And as you know, I'm sure you know, only 72% of reps actually expect to hit that quota. And since 2022, when rates have declined 17%, sales cycles are taking 23% longer. So in short, it's not just CEOs who are hurting.

00:07:09:14 — 00:07:33:03
Rahul: Reps today are taking longer to close fewer deals. Now, that isn't going to be a surprise to anybody. Every deal these days has more stakeholders, financiers, more likely to get involved. Budgets are tight, frozen, sometimes even nonexistent. And a lot of technology companies are trying to solve that problem. That's why we found that reps we've spoken to are using an average of ten tools to close a deal.

00:07:33:05 — 00:08:03:15
Rahul: But what we noticed is that all of these other technology companies are building tools which are adjacent to email, and yet sellers spend more time in email than any other tool. I would actually argue that email is the most important sales technology, but email itself was never designed for sales. And for example, sellers need to constantly switch out of that email into their CRM, their sales engagement platform and multiple other tools just to move deals forward.

00:08:03:17 — 00:08:33:01
Rahul: Not only does that slow down every reply, every quotes, every proposal, every contract, two thirds of reps are actually also feeling overwhelmed by their sales apps now, and account executives have to frequently paste screenshots of emails into Slack or Microsoft teams just to collaborate and get deals done. So that takes those long sales cycles and makes them even longer and of course, sales managers need to regularly coach reps on email behavior, how to write them, when to send them, what to say.

00:08:33:03 — 00:08:59:16
Rahul: But that's really hard, very fiddly and very time consuming. As you know, we spent the last eight years building the fastest and most powerful email experience in the world. So that puts us in the perfect position to answer the question What does email look like when you design it specifically for sales? So we have three core pillars. We have collaboration, we have insights and AI, and we have running a flawless sales cycle.

00:08:59:18 — 00:09:03:17
Rahul: So for makes sense. I'm happy to jump through each of those points and we can talk about like, let's talk.

00:09:03:18 — 00:09:34:07
Sahil: Here. That sounds super exciting and I very strongly agree that, you know, the context switching between tools, pasting screenshots of emails in Slack like the problems that you're identifying I think are very common, even collaborating on what the right responses to a customer can be really difficult. Like you're often doing that in Slack because there's no way for you to like edit emails in a multiple player view the way that you can and slack which which, you know, just creates additional barriers to entry and creates additional problems.

00:09:34:07 — 00:09:41:04
Sahil: So, I very, I very strongly resonate with that with the problem statement tone And tell me more about how you solved it.

00:09:41:06 — 00:10:07:22
Rahul: Okay. Let's take collaboration first or superhuman for sales. You can now share, comment and collaborate right from your inbox. So let's take a deal example. Imagine you want to get a deal discounts approved. You might then need input from your manager or your finance team or maybe rev ups in Gmail or Outlook. You'd have to book emails or replies and paste screenshots into Slack and you'd have to do that constantly just to keep everybody in the loop.

00:10:07:24 — 00:10:29:09
Rahul: And even as you kiss approval and you tell the customer, you then have to keep going back to the CRM to update your notes and keep your manager informed. Which superhuman for sales. You can now comment directly on an email and mention your teammates that will actually share a live view of the email, including all past messages and all future messages.

00:10:29:11 — 00:10:52:08
Rahul: You don't need to be CC anymore. You don't need to forward anymore. You don't need to screenshot anymore. Your teammates can then review and comment directly on the email. And not only does that keep the conversation in one place, it also keeps everybody on the same page. Everything happens just so much faster and as you progress you can then of course update HubSpot or Salesforce or whatever your CRM is without leaving super human.

00:10:52:10 — 00:10:54:15
Rahul: So that in a nutshell is the collaboration.

00:10:54:15 — 00:11:17:04
Sahil: Pillar Yeah, it's super interesting, I guess when you say a live view of the of the email with kind of a record of what's happened already, that it's pulling all of the like the thread of the email and sending that into it or basically displaying it to the person so you don't need to be like, here's what happened and here's what we talked about and whatnot.

00:11:17:04 — 00:11:20:16
Sahil: You can save the time of doing the updates as well.

00:11:20:18 — 00:11:39:04
Rahul: Exactly. It's the entire email. And think about when you forward an email, you're really only forwarding the particular email that you hit upon or that you clicked forward on. And whatever the quote is content happens to be. It doesn't have all the previous emails in the conversation or in the thread, it doesn't have the previous attachments in the conversation or in the thread.

00:11:39:04 — 00:12:05:21
Rahul: It doesn't have any of the context and it doesn't forward any future emails. It is the most broken, primitive atomic sharing units you can actually imagine. And so we we thought that entire process. What if you could just click share, although of course this is super human, so you hit commands to share the conversation and the entire thing gets shared all past emails or future emails on that conversation attachments included.

00:12:05:23 — 00:12:21:06
Rahul: Now your manager or your finance team or rev ops can immediately get up to speed and just reply and say, Sure, deals approved or you can use this pricing or whatever it is you need to get them. And that's why we're actually seeing teams move faster with super human to sales.

00:12:21:08 — 00:12:41:19
Sahil: That's so smart because, you know, like as the CEO of the company, but you know, coming from a background in sales, like, you know, any time that you have an update on a deal, you want to see all the contacts and like what's going on. And sometimes you only get the like, you know, customer said we're not going to move forward or they decided not to, whatever.

00:12:41:21 — 00:13:02:07
Sahil: And then you're like, Well, what happened? Tell me more. And like, there's a lot of internal time that gets wasted in that where if they could just like delay add me to the it's almost like it's almost like adding me to the account, you know, if you could just like add me to the account at the moment in which like we have a critical update, then, then we can collaborate on how to like objection, handle or solve the problem or whatnot.

00:13:02:09 — 00:13:31:02
Sahil: The super IT it's a super smart process. And then the lack of attachments and stuff is so annoying too, when you're like going through and trying to figure out what was that like, Hey, they rejected our latest proposal, but the proposal attachment isn't there. So I don't actually know what the pricing was. And like, there's so many parts of that that's really broken, really, really cool to imagine you being able to loop everyone in with just one share as opposed to like doing all this work to give people context and attachments and previous email threads and stuff.

00:13:31:04 — 00:13:49:04
Sahil: So that's, that's really awesome. On top of that, the future sharing is really cool, which is to say that like if, if you share, if you add me to this account, share this email with me, then then whatever, like, you know, like collaborate on a response. We send the response. But now I'm waiting around to see if the customer ever responded or not.

00:13:49:04 — 00:13:55:10
Sahil: Right? And then if I'm able to stay in the loop of what's happening with the deal, it just makes life so much easier. That's super cool, man.

00:13:55:12 — 00:14:13:16
Rahul: Exactly. Yeah. Let's say you and I are working on a really important deal together, and you're my manager. I want. I just want to keep you in the loop If it's an important deal, you presumably also care, right? This matters to the both of us. So I just mentioned you on that email. It shares all the previous emails scheduled of future emails as the conversation evolves.

00:14:13:16 — 00:14:34:16
Rahul: That's just now in your inbox. You can find it with search. You can leave further comments. We both don't have to make trips to the CRM constantly busy seeing or going backwards and forwards. And even if you have automatic sync set up, there's always that frustrating moment. If you go to the CRM, you look at the account and just as you said, it's like customer doesn't want to proceed.

00:14:34:18 — 00:14:59:01
Rahul: You're like, Why? What's what's going on here? Actually being able to see it directly and for you and I to have that conversation in the same place where collaboration is actually happening and that's really, really key. So that's collaboration. Pillar number two is you can now give your team the insights to know what to do, like a top performer and the A.I. to do it flawlessly, like a top performer.

00:14:59:03 — 00:15:19:08
Rahul: So we have a feature called Absolutely. We have a feature called Smart Send that delivers emails when they're most likely to be opened so you can make your email appear at the top of a prospect's inbox at just the right time. You know, some people don't do their email until it's 11 a.m. or sort of 12 p.m.. Some people actually start in the afternoon.

00:15:19:10 — 00:15:37:10
Rahul: A lot of founders, CEOs I know actually kind of ignore it on Thursday or Friday and catch up on Saturday and Sunday. But how do you, as a seller, know what your prospect is going to do? How do you know what their behavior is? That's what smart sense holds. So when you're writing an email, you can just hit smart send and boom will say, You know what?

00:15:37:10 — 00:15:44:02
Rahul: We're going to schedule this at 7 minutes past 10 a.m. on Saturday morning because that's when real is most likely to open his email.

00:15:44:04 — 00:15:48:00
Sahil: And how do you know when someone's most likely to open the email.

00:15:48:02 — 00:15:55:16
Rahul: That is built off the back of eight years of having the fastest email experience in the world and well over a billion emails sent?

00:15:55:18 — 00:16:10:02
Sahil: You got it. So you basically used your own data in order to figure out what time different personas and different types of people are most likely to open emails. And then you like smart scheduling to show up at the time at which you think has the highest likelihood of being read.

00:16:10:04 — 00:16:30:01
Rahul: Exactly. Exactly. It is arguably our first data product, and so that's Smart send and that sits next to another feature called Recent Opens that shows a real time feed of people opening your emails because then you can follow up when your top of mind will have the experience where, you know, we send an email and obviously we don't hear back.

00:16:30:01 — 00:16:51:08
Rahul: People are busy, or maybe it's just not quite the right time. But then suddenly out of the blue you get an email back from that person and it could be a week later, it could be two weeks later, it could have actually had it. Even as you think about enterprise sales, I've had it even three months later or a year later when the the customer's like, Hey, I'm finally ready to actually do something here.

00:16:51:10 — 00:17:08:20
Rahul: Now, imagine if you could tell when people were thinking about you, but with the recent open speed, you can you can see when they've opened your email, even if it was one that you sent six months ago, it's the little feed that sits on the right hand side of superhuman. When you start your day, you can see who's been opening your email over the last day or so.

00:17:08:22 — 00:17:31:17
Rahul: You can now touch base with perfect timing, and this is an amazing way to resurrect a conversation that may have gone stale. It's also an amazing way to get people to get back in touch with you. If you reach out within a few minutes of people opening your email or actually just really within even a few hours, you are an order of magnitude more likely for that person to respond.

00:17:31:19 — 00:17:52:19
Sahil: Totally. Do you? And I've heard that like Apple has some I don't I'm not like an expert in this, but I've heard that there's some sort of like tracking privacy thing where they're trying to like obfuscate when people open emails because, you know, back in the day, remember that this was technology that we had had access to as salespeople where, you know, you would you would get a ping when someone opened your email.

00:17:52:19 — 00:18:01:06
Sahil: But I think it doesn't work as well anymore or something like that. Do you do you face this issue or is it something that you've come across?

00:18:01:08 — 00:18:26:09
Rahul: If anything, it actually works better than it did previously. So the there's this constant jostle between folks who wants to see when people open their emails. And actually it's usually marketers, not salespeople. We think that salespeople send a lot of email. Boy, that's true. Marketers send the most email in the world. And there's a tension between what Marks's wants to and what email service providers make possible.

00:18:26:11 — 00:18:52:15
Rahul: And there have been moments in the past where briefly the technology has broken. So for folks who don't know, this is basically pixel tracking. You embed an invisible one by one or sometimes zero by zero pixel in the email. If the other person has images downloaded in the email clients, they can just the email client downloads it and then the sender can see whether or not the email was sent for a week.

00:18:52:17 — 00:19:17:23
Rahul: A few years ago, Gmail deliberately turn that off because they wanted to protect people in a certain way. Or you could argue whether or not it's actually protecting anything. And then a week later they reversed stance because it did actually break tracking for basically anyone who ever sent about a kind. And so there was this very natural tension here over time, what we've seen is that more and more people are comfortable with this.

00:19:18:00 — 00:19:42:23
Rahul: And if they're not, there's actually plenty of technology available to not be tracked. You just turn on privacy mode. To your point, Apple has a privacy mode supreme and also has a privacy mode. The various kinds you can turn off all images. You can also turn off non tracking pixels. Of course, that includes super human. But if you're a seller, this is a super power to be able to know that someone is thinking of you and being able to reach out at the right time.

00:19:43:00 — 00:19:53:05
Rahul: And of course, none of us want to sell something to somebody who doesn't want it. I mean, that's the worst kind of sales. We genuinely want to make people's lives better, and if we can do that faster, then why wouldn't we?

00:19:53:07 — 00:20:23:21
Sahil: Sure. No, I mean, I think the you know, if someone opens your email and and that's that's a great time to call it. I mean, as a salesperson, we used to try to time it where if somebody opened the email, we would try to call them within 5 minutes of when they opened the email knowing that A, they have some time right now because I look at my email and they're thinking of me already, so I'm top of mind, and if I get them on the phone, they're like the likelihood of converting that into meeting or getting an update on the deal or whatever it might be is just much higher.

00:20:24:02 — 00:20:37:15
Sahil: We used to do this a lot with procurement people, actually, because, you know, procurement people are very hard to get on the phone. They know not to do that. And so, you know, you wait till the procurement person opens your email and then you call right away knowing that they have some time. And it does make a big difference.

00:20:37:15 — 00:21:01:05
Sahil: There's no doubt about it. Speed to lead and timing makes a huge difference in sales. And so any advantage, any any edge you can get in this market where you know, the sites that the stats you were citing at the beginning are being felt so hard in the sales community. The you know, the average salesperson quota attainment has you said 72% of salespeople.

00:21:01:05 — 00:21:03:02
Sahil: It was already 72% of salespeople.

00:21:03:02 — 00:21:04:23
Rahul: 70% expects to. Has it?

00:21:04:23 — 00:21:40:05
Sahil: Yeah, expect to hit quota. So what's interesting about that is we track real quota attainment at bravado for for our members and the in 2008 Q4 of 2021, 59% of salespeople had a quota. Mm hmm. And in Q4 of 2023, that number dropped to 31%. And so salespeople are really struggling to hit quota. And so I think, you know, a lot of what you're talking about here is saving time, helping you schedule emails to get them see more often.

00:21:40:07 — 00:21:59:06
Sahil: You know, this sort of stuff again, like this small 1%, 2% make a huge difference in your opportunity to to actually hit your number this year and beyond. So the super interesting I know that you have a reply tool in the original superhuman product is that also brought over to superhuman for sales and how do you think about that as well?

00:21:59:08 — 00:22:23:03
Rahul: It is, yeah. That's a part of this second pillar, which is all about the insights to know what to do and the AI to do it flawlessly. So we brought over superhuman AI and where we find sellers most loving, this is the ability to just jot down a few phrases and super human. I will turn them into a fully written email and we actually match the voice and tone in the emails you already sent.

00:22:23:05 — 00:22:50:04
Rahul: So the email sounds like you. So it's super human A.I. You can now write faster than ever before. So between the recent Topaz feed, between smart send and superhuman AI, that makes up the second pillar. And I'm going to just sort of cover the basic so this 100 more things that Superhuman does, of course, but that makes it the second pillar and brings us neatly onto the third pillar, which is running a flawless sales cycle.

00:22:50:06 — 00:23:14:10
Rahul: Imagine being able to run a flawless sales cycle every single time. When you're scheduling, you can use share availability to book meetings instantly with no back and forth when you're sending an email will actually remind you if you don't hear back. So you can follow up on time every time. And then with snippets, which is our template feature, you can instantly insert phrases, common responses, the most effective outreach.

00:23:14:16 — 00:23:30:08
Rahul: You can also share all of these with your team. So this is just the tip of the iceberg and superhuman for sales to so much more. But between collaboration and insights and are running the perfect sales cycle every single time, I think that's a pretty good overview.

00:23:30:10 — 00:23:50:02
Sahil: Yeah. Can we talk about the feature? Because because a big there's the writing feature specifically, you know, this is always a problem is that, you know, like you get an email from a customer and you're like, Right, I want to write a good am I write a good response to this person and maybe, maybe, maybe they've come back and they say, Hey, we just don't have a budget this year.

00:23:50:02 — 00:24:07:19
Sahil: Sorry. You know, and you want to you want to basically offer a discount in order to get the deal done. The nuance of how to write that email. Like if you looked at how a top performer would handle that, like their email is going to read like, you know, like poetry and then you're going to have and they're going to do it with subtlety and with finesse and whatever.

00:24:08:00 — 00:24:34:14
Sahil: And then you're you're going to look at an average or a low performer, and they're going to do it in this like blunt, obtuse sort of way that's going to be more of a turnoff to the customer than not. How do you think about leveling the playing field for salespeople and using superhuman AI? Like, what do I need to do in order to have it help me write a good like, you know, offer this person a 20% discount, but don't make me look like a cheap car salesperson, you know, like, how do you how do you think about that?

00:24:34:16 — 00:25:08:12
Rahul: Yeah, I mean, that's obviously going to be a work in progress. I, I think in any product hasn't reached quite that level of top performer human nuance, but I don't think it's very far away. If you look at the rate at which A.I. is improving, it might be 1224, 36 months away at the very most the way that you do superhuman A.I. to do that today is as a way to not have writer's block and to have something to actually start to work with and then to start to pull in other people, probably your manager or the top performers on your team to give you some advice and take a look.

00:25:08:14 — 00:25:27:16
Rahul: It is and you'll know this the CEO, it is so much faster to work with a draft than to stare at a blank page or a blank email and just think, Gosh, what do I say, sir? What you would do in Superhuman is you'd hit command. J That's the shortcut for superhuman A.I., and you'd type in a few notes.

00:25:27:16 — 00:25:53:01
Rahul: You'd say something like explain or make the customer feel heard, convey appreciation, Explain that we've already pushed to the limits of our price, but I'll do one more run around internally and see what I can do. Stand by. I'll be back shortly. In the meantime, here's some of the stuff, right? And you'll you'll say that in some note form, hit enter and then super human.

00:25:53:03 — 00:26:13:24
Rahul: I will actually write that in your own voice and tone. And it's going to reference previous emails you've written, so it's going to match those. That's where the collaboration features get really useful because then you can put that in a comments, You can ping your manager or you can ping Bob or Jane down down the corridor to the virtual corridor I suppose, and say, Hey, this is what I'm thinking of writing.

00:26:13:24 — 00:26:31:16
Rahul: I know you closed the deal just like this last quarter. Is there anything that you can say to make this better? Mm hmm. Or another way to lead into all of this is to use snippets. So we briefly just touched upon them right now as part of pillar number three, which is just what if you could just be flawless every single time?

00:26:31:18 — 00:26:49:22
Rahul: And part of that is snippets and snippets can be shared across the team. So if you have somebody on your team who is a top performer or if you are and you're like, I just have this email that slays every single time I could, you know, there were these deals that we sort of get our back pressed up against the wall and we don't know what to say.

00:26:49:22 — 00:27:21:06
Rahul: But I figured out this wording or this reframing of the problem that makes people get to yes, you can then actually share those templates with your team, and that's another way that you can solve the cold start problem and in the not too distant future, we're actually going to fuze these things with superhuman. AI knows about your snippets and knows about the language that you use, that your company knows about the products, the problems you solve, the way that you talk about them, and it will actually be able to start to take those and incorporate those in the responses that that generates for you as well.

00:27:21:08 — 00:27:44:12
Sahil: Well, that's really powerful because that's that was actually one of the things I was thinking is like we have certain phrases and things that we say of bravado all the time that are kind of like our code words or our like, you know, whatever our market messaging. And how well will Super Superhuman be able to pick up on like the way that we talk about something as opposed to how the market might talk about something?

00:27:44:12 — 00:27:47:11
Sahil: And that sends like a really powerful feature.

00:27:47:13 — 00:27:48:06
Rahul: Yeah.

00:27:48:08 — 00:28:10:19
Sahil: Cool. So 111 more specific question on superhuman for sales, and then I want to talk about the pricing and the and the offer for the bravado community and whatnot. But I'm curious about your thoughts on, you know, a lot of sales reps use outreach or sales loft or something like that, and they work off of tools like that.

00:28:10:21 — 00:28:29:10
Sahil: There's also like front, which I know has some tools like this as well. How do you think about competitive differentiation and how do you think about like if I'm a sales person and I'm considering this, you know, where does this sit in my tech stack? How should I be thinking about this versus other email tools or other tools generally that I might be using?

00:28:29:12 — 00:28:48:19
Rahul: Yeah. So if we think about sales loft, you think about outreach, that's really for outbound prospecting, primarily for stars. Of course, a lot of A's do their own prospecting as well, but even so, you're not going to use sales loft or outreach as an email client. That would be slow and clunky. It doesn't even work properly for that.

00:28:48:21 — 00:29:09:19
Rahul: So it's not that. It's also what friends and friends is really designed for multichannel friends. It's really designed for essentially customer service or support. It is primarily a ticketing system. It's really good when you have a set of people you kind of on a round robin things, you want to make sure nothing falls through the cracks and that's what it excels at.

00:29:09:21 — 00:29:26:04
Rahul: And in general, there's a lot of sales technology out there beyond just those three products that we talked about. But every time a prospect replies or they want a demo or they start to move through the sales cycle where two sellers actually end up.

00:29:26:06 — 00:29:28:11
Sahil: Yeah. And in Gmail for sure.

00:29:28:11 — 00:29:48:17
Rahul: It's in Gmail or in or in office 305. Exactly. And both of those are one size fits all tools, neither of which was designed for sales or super human for sales was designed explicitly for sales teams. And our goal is to help reps get from stage one to closed one faster than you could possibly do in Gmail or in Outlook.

00:29:48:17 — 00:29:57:21
Rahul: And there's no other tool focused on the staged one to stage one two closed one problem like we are. There's no other company building an entire email client specifically to sell us.

00:29:57:23 — 00:30:17:01
Sahil: I love that. Last question for on this before you get to the go to market is increasingly we do a lot more of our sales through text message and slack. So like once we have a prospect that we have a conversation with, you know, we'll try to move them into some sort of instant communication channel, it makes going back and forth faster and whatnot.

00:30:17:02 — 00:30:39:16
Sahil: I'm curious how you might be thinking about, you know, collaboration through that lens. Is there a is there a world in which there's a more live communication stream that can take place between me and my customer? Because certainly for us, it's helped increase sales cycles, it's helped shorten sales cycles when we're able to to, you know, just go back and forth really quickly with the customer in that way.

00:30:39:21 — 00:30:41:23
Sahil: I'm curious what your point of view on that is.

00:30:42:00 — 00:31:07:20
Rahul: Yeah, of course. I mean, most important deals have some components of text message or WhatsApp or instant messaging going on. It's such an obvious and powerful way to really lean on the human to human connection and also just cut out all the rest of it. So I think at a certain point that's something we'll consider. Slack, on the other hand, I think really shines after the sale.

00:31:07:22 — 00:31:32:16
Rahul: For example, we set up Slack channels with many of our customers to support them after things are said and done. And we're into implementation, we're into customer success and we're into growing that account over time. I also think Slack can shine pre-sales, but for certain very specific kind of sales. I'm thinking of your largest deals. You know, those with enterprise contracts, long multiyear deal cycles.

00:31:32:18 — 00:32:06:14
Rahul: It's it's really a very long relationship over time. But for most sellers, for most SMB and mid-market reps who are working a large number of deals, Slack just doesn't make sense. Even text message, it's going to be challenging. For example, one of our customers sells mid-market technology with an ACB of 35 K, The Reps run eight demos a day and we had this very conversation and they simply don't have the time to spin up a new Slack channel and get everybody invited, all the stakeholders, before they need to move on.

00:32:06:14 — 00:32:26:07
Rahul: And frankly, neither does the customer. You know, you've got this brief moment where you get together for the demo, you've got emails that are flying around for that and after that. And the magic of email is that it is blazingly fast and it just works without friction. That is not true for Slack. It is really powerful post sales and that's when we use it.

00:32:26:09 — 00:32:30:13
Rahul: But that's also why email is the lingua franca of business.

00:32:30:15 — 00:32:53:03
Sahil: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I love that expression. The email is the lingua franca of a business and so that's really cool. Okay, let's talk about go to market. So one of the things you said is that outbound prospecting as a as a strategy and as a channel is is decaying and meh, you know, people call it's dying.

00:32:53:03 — 00:33:12:11
Sahil: I don't know it's dying. We still book a lot of emails using cold email, but but not as many as we used to and with a lot more effort than it used to take. So, you know, I think it's harder, certainly, you know, how do you think about the go to market of superhuman for sales? How do you I mean, obviously we're doing this and, you know, we're we're doing a you're doing some community LED stuff.

00:33:12:11 — 00:33:34:21
Sahil: Obviously, you know, you have a brand that is as well recognized as any in the tech community. But how do you think about bringing superhuman to sales? Go to market selling to sales leaders, selling to rev ops, getting it in front of them? You know, people are busy. There's a lot of sales tools out there. And how do you think about competing in this market?

00:33:34:23 — 00:33:59:18
Rahul: Yeah, well, first of all, I think it starts with having a clear sense of your competitive differentiation. We're not a CRM, we're not a sales engagement platform. We in the email clients, which is maybe weird, I mean, very few pieces of sales technology are actually an email clients. And like I said, I don't think anyone has ever built an email client just for salespeople.

00:33:59:20 — 00:34:24:07
Rahul: And so it's and we can get into a theory of company building. This is one of those things where the story that we have to tell is actually there is a new products that you've never bought before that you should. And the way I sometimes that to a seller or to a sales leader is I draw this simple diagram of visuals and it has three circles.

00:34:24:07 — 00:34:46:06
Rahul: You can have your CRM up here, you can have your SVP down here and you can have your email over here in a little triangle. And if you think about how much you might pay per rep, per month today, you're probably paying a median price of $150 per month for your CRM. You might be paying 100, 150, $300 a month for your engagement platform.

00:34:46:08 — 00:35:07:02
Rahul: And if you're using Gmail or Outlook, you're paying five, seven, $12 per month for your email clients. And yet that is the tool that all of these three people spend the most time in. In fact, sellers spend more time in email and they spend in any other tool. And it may seem like a great deal, but of course, you know this, I know this.

00:35:07:04 — 00:35:28:21
Rahul: We get what we pay for and what we're getting there is a one size fits all tool that wasn't designed specifically for sales and a big part of my go to market is actually the positioning and the narrative. And like, you know, we've all taken this for granted for 40 years. We have to start to make people aware that this is a thing that we've been taking for granted and that actually it doesn't have to be this way.

00:35:28:23 — 00:35:52:18
Rahul: But now finally, we've done the grind over the last eight years of building the fastest email experience in the world. We've completed the platform puzzle Supreme and now works with Gmail and Outlook on every single combination of platform on a mac, on Windows, on Web, on iPhone, on Android. And we've had time to answer the question, what is the most powerful email experience you can imagine for a seller?

00:35:52:20 — 00:36:22:08
Rahul: So it starts with positioning, it starts with narrative, but then super human. I mean, to your point, like cold outbound is really hard supreme like so many other companies these days, grows with products like growth, with product led sales. In fact, I think 70% of our country active accounts started, more than 70% started with an individual signing up for superhuman self service.

00:36:22:10 — 00:36:43:00
Rahul: Then make a team self service. That team then hits critical mass, which for us is in the region of 10 to 15 people. An account manager reaches out, the salesperson reaches out. We then have a conversation and we then say, Hey, it looks like you're using superhuman. You maybe you have like three or four of your sellers on it, but you obviously have more sellers.

00:36:43:02 — 00:37:07:05
Rahul: Did know how much more powerful it could be if you actually make this a team tool. So that's 70% of all contracted accounts that the other 30% looks a lot more traditional. It's people signing up for webinars or it is called outbound, which we do, but it is harder for us as it is for everybody nowadays than that strategy which is so effective.

00:37:07:07 — 00:37:34:08
Rahul: The final piece is word of mouth due to two things due to AI and due to enterprise. So it's no surprise that a is a thing that people are looking for. You know, we are massively investing in it. We talked about with, but that's just one of our flagship AI features. We also have auto summarize. Imagine a one liner that automatically keeps itself up to date above every single conversation.

00:37:34:10 — 00:37:51:20
Rahul: And what we found is that people are moving faster than ever before because they don't often need to read the entire email. They can just read the one liner if they want more information, they get a keyboard shortcut that expands. They can now see bullet points summarizing the email. And unlike Gmail, unlike Outlook that is pre-computer, it's instantly available.

00:37:51:21 — 00:38:16:20
Rahul: Don't have to, you know, hit Gemini and wait 5 seconds for the things happen. We have instant reply. Imagine waking up to an inbox where every single email already had a draft reply which is edit and then send and sometimes you wouldn't even need to edit. And most recently we launched Ask a I email is a treasure trove of information Customer correspondence of course deal updates.

00:38:16:22 — 00:38:48:14
Rahul: If you are a sales manager or your hiring candidate correspondence, I hope so much internal stuff. And yet for 40 years we had to rely on search, right? We've had to remember keywords, gas, subject source scan, subject lines, send a just like scan through this list and it's such a difficult way to find things. Whereas with ask you are you can just stop searching and start finding you simply ask, you know, when is the Q three go to market off sites?

00:38:48:16 — 00:39:10:10
Rahul: What's the latest with Deal X, y, Z? Wow. How much did we close? I'm trying not to mention customers here, which is So how much do we close a deal? ABC for? And it just finds the answers because all of that information by the way, is in your email. So when it comes to email, we now actually lead the category.

00:39:10:12 — 00:39:34:02
Rahul: I US news chose us as the best AI powered email client for 2024. And to bring this back full circle to your go to market question, those things matter. So if you're building a company like being the best in your category, I actually really matters. Most of our leads actually come in because they've heard super Human is amazing at AI, whether you're a salesperson or not, and they want to learn more.

00:39:34:04 — 00:40:02:10
Rahul: And then that ties in into the up market pull over the last year, we're now being pulled up markets into the enterprise. Our largest deployments have grown from small startups to teams of several thousand, and we've gone beyond serving just the technology industry where we originally started into professional services, banking, finance, even government. And the net result of that is over the last year with more than double the rate at which we welcome new users.

00:40:02:12 — 00:40:31:05
Rahul: And that, combined with everything else, now creates a flywheel. So you start to get this word of mouth effects. Even in large enterprises, you know, we've sold a very well known large US strategic consulting firm recently and a of those people also obviously talk to management consultants at other strategy consulting firms. And so that word of mouth that starts to happen and they reach out to us and they're like, well, we're figuring out, all right, strategy, can we run a pilot with you?

00:40:31:07 — 00:40:38:02
Rahul: And that's now a form of products like growth. But it's happening even at mid-market, even at enterprise.

00:40:38:04 — 00:41:07:21
Sahil: Yeah, that's really cool. And, you know, I still remember the first time I got exposed to Superhuman, you know, six, seven years ago. And it was it's such a it's such a magical experience to have a tool that could get you to Inbox Zero really quickly and give you all these shortcuts and all these superpowers. And and I remember you had the little said by Superhuman at the bottom, and, you know, it quickly grew that all of the tech community was really using it.

00:41:07:23 — 00:41:28:02
Sahil: And then I started seeing it outside the tech community. You know, I got I would get emails from a front from someone in a in a different sector, in banking, finance, whatever, and they would have this superhuman. And it started becoming more and more in vogue. And I feel like you're like at the next level of that now where you're getting, you know, large enterprises who are coming to you for the products.

00:41:28:04 — 00:41:34:20
Sahil: The ask the the asking, I think is that just in your own inbox or do you have a team view of that.

00:41:34:22 — 00:41:55:08
Rahul: That today is just in your own inbox? But we're not trying to be clean. For example, Folkestone or Queens, this amazing tool that was sort of index your entire company's information. It's really focused on what's in your inbox, what's in your calendars, what's in your contacts. And those are the three things that we immediately have access to. But we're not going to stop there.

00:41:55:10 — 00:42:17:18
Rahul: We do also, at the same time have, you know, when people sign up for signing in with Google or the signing up with Office 365. So we'll be able to pull in over time documents that you may have access to that might be relevant. You also connect your CRM, you connect to HubSpot or Salesforce, and over time we'll be able to connect to those systems with Ask I.

00:42:17:20 — 00:42:38:04
Rahul: And what we're really building towards here is a fully fledged agents, sales agents. If you will, where you can ask meaningful questions. And if the information isn't in your email, it knows to go out to Salesforce or to go out to HubSpot and retrieve information for that. And then we've that into the into the thing that you're trying to do.

00:42:38:06 — 00:42:55:10
Sahil: And that's really cool. That's super powerful because it happens to all of us, as you know, and it's a hard problem to solve. And so it's always exciting to see it come to life. All right. Well, thank you so much for spending the time. I've got three more questions for you that are that are a little bit lighter, more fun.

00:42:55:12 — 00:43:15:16
Sahil:
I really appreciate the the deep dive into Superhuman for sales. But before we let you go, we got to get a couple of fun ones. So maybe let's start here, which is as a founder, you're obviously involved in a lot of sales cycles and a lot of deals and you touch it. What's your favorite part of sales and what's the part of sales you hate the most?

00:43:15:18 — 00:43:47:22
Rahul: Gosh, okay. I mean, this is probably true for every sales person or any seller. My favorite part of sales is meeting and hanging out with customers. You know, steak dinners are happening less than they used to or whatever it is that you eat. But like I said, we recently closed a very large enterprise deal and just being able to go and hang out with all those folks was like maybe three or four people from the super human side, 12 or 13 from the customer side.

00:43:47:24 — 00:44:05:06
Rahul: And we'd worked so hard sales to get this deal done. Like this was a sales cycle that was probably 12, 13, 14 months in the making. And at this point we felt like a team. I mean, you probably experienced this, right, when you when you sell, when it takes that long to sell something because it's the first deal about size.

00:44:05:06 — 00:44:27:09
Rahul: We've done and now the customer actually feels like they're on the superhuman team. They said to us that Superhuman felt like we were on their team and that it was the best sales cycle they've ever actually been a part of. We're the best friend that they've ever worked with. And that camaraderie, when you're at that closing dinner, that's my favorite thing.

00:44:27:11 — 00:44:31:22
Sahil: I love that. That's. And what about your least favorite?

00:44:31:24 — 00:44:52:19
Rahul: My least favorite thing is it's the waiting. It's it's like, hey, it's like 5 p.m. on Friday. What we about to hear back. And you wait and you wait and you wait. And then. And then you get an email or the guy text to you and it's like, So sorry we didn't get the chance to talk about it internally this week.

00:44:52:21 — 00:45:01:22
Rahul: I promise he will let you know on Monday and then you can relax. Then you can go have a weekend or whatever it is. But yeah, it's the waiting. It's tough.

00:45:01:24 — 00:45:27:17
Sahil: Yeah, I think there's a lot of people who are going to resonate with that for sure, my friend. And then a last question for you is around the the offer for the bravado community. You'd mentioned that, you know, you'd be you'd be extending something to the to the community. You know, as part of this partnership. You want to talk a little bit about that and how people when they want to sign up, how they can get access to that.

00:45:27:19 — 00:45:51:17
Rahul: Yes, absolutely. So this is a secret offer for the bravado community. Go to superhuman dot com slash bravado and you'll end up in a special version of our flow where if you get superhuman that way, you actually also get two months free. So we don't once. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We don't want any kind of roadblocks for people trying this.

00:45:51:17 — 00:46:13:10
Rahul: We, we know that we're onto something really, really special. Like I mentioned, we've had many sales teams been using Superhuman for sales over the last few months. We're finding that reps can work more deals, sales capacity is increased. We're finding that deals cycle, short deals cycles. Shorten And we just want every sell it to try it at this point and to give us your feedback.

00:46:13:10 — 00:46:26:18
Rahul: I mean, we're not done building it, we're launching it probably as of when this podcast recording goes out and we can work with you to make the best possible sales experience that you can imagine for you and your of sellers.

00:46:26:20 — 00:46:50:10
Sahil: Well, thank you so much for spending the time and thank you for that super generous offer. Again, it's super human Icons Slash Bravado Two months for free. Really exciting. I will I will end by saying that, you know, you're you're somebody who I obviously share a close friendship with, but also someone who I admire very much for your craftsmanship around building great products I used reported back in the day.

00:46:50:10 — 00:47:21:11
Sahil: So I'm sure did many salespeople. So, you know, we're all familiar with it in the we're familiar with what took it and did with it, which we're less happy about, but great, you know, incredible product. And and to have somebody who is a founder who's building a tool for salespeople that touches email, which is such a hard problem to solve, and is doing so with all these, like really innovative, unique features that I'd never even imagined that you'd be able to do is is hugely exciting and is a win for salespeople everywhere.

00:47:21:11 — 00:47:43:01
Sahil: You know, I we want you to win. We want this to be an awesome product because it's going to help salespeople. And like, our mission at this company is to help salespeople be more successful in their careers. And you're building a tool that can help them do that in the one place that there's been no innovation whatsoever. Yeah, you're your Venn diagram of like you're spending hundreds of dollars on a CRM that your salesperson hates and doesn't want to log into.

00:47:43:07 — 00:48:05:09
Sahil: You're spending hundreds of dollars on a prospecting tool that is decaying in efficacy every single week because the channels aren't working, and then you're spending nine bucks a month on your Gmail account. And that's actually the backbone of your entire go to market operation, especially post meeting. Very close. Yeah. I mean, that makes so much sense, man. And hugely exciting.

00:48:05:09 — 00:48:11:24
Sahil: Congratulations and excited to to see this to be wildly successful.

00:48:12:01 — 00:48:18:05
Rahul: Amazing. Well, thank you so much style you for having me and for everyone who made it to this point. Thank you for watching or listening.

00:48:18:09 — 00:48:20:08
Sahil: Awesome. Thank you so much and take care.


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