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Podcast

Product-Led Sales, Product Validation, and Unintentional Category Creation with Alexa Grabell, CEO of Pocus

Product-Led Sales, Product Validation, and Unintentional Category Creation with Alexa Grabell, CEO of Pocus

As a founder, it can be tough to balance work and personal life, make tough decisions, and stay motivated.

In this episode, Alexa Grabell, founder of Pocus, shared some valuable insights and advice for other founders out there. 

Alexa is the co-founder and CEO of Pocus, the first Product-Led Sales (PLS) platform. Pocus helps go-to-market teams use data to improve customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion – without relying on engineers. Alexa’s passion for PLS began when she led sales strategy & operations at Dataminr, where she built internal solutions to power sales teams with data.

Alexa also shared her experience as a first-time founder and how she has learned to delegate tasks to her team members. She emphasized the importance of hiring the right people and putting them in the right positions to do their best work.

Overall, Alexa’s journey highlights the importance of flexibility, adaptability, and a willingness to learn and evolve. By prioritizing your team, setting goals, and staying true to your vision, you can navigate the challenges of building a successful startup.

If you want to hear more about Alexa Grabell’s journey be sure to listen to this episode.

Topics

  • Empowering Women in Tech
  • Creating a Culture for Female Founders
  • Building a Diverse Team
  • Product Led Sales 
  • Challenges of Building Internal Data System
  • Building vs Buying
  • Investment from Design Partners 
  • Creating a Category 
  • Building a Community
  • Learning as a Founder 
  • Empowering Others
  • Finding a Peer Group 
  • Passion and Trade-offs 
  • Prioritizing Self-Care
  • Recruiting Process
  • Marketing as the First Hire

Listen to the podcast:

Key Takeaways:

[00:12:21] Empowering Women in Tech 

They discuss the importance of empowering women in tech, and how Alexa’s mission to do so led her to start her own company.

[00:13:43] Creating a Culture for Female Founders 

Alexa Grabell talks about her desire to create a company and culture that can inspire other women to become founders in the tech industry.

[00:14:57] Building a Diverse Team 

Alexa Grabell talks about the importance of diversity in building a team and how it has come naturally to Pocus, with four moms among their 24 employees.

[00:16:06] Product-Led Sales 

Alexa explains the concept of product-led growth and how it led to the development of product-led sales, which combines self-serve users with a sales motion to drive revenue.

 [00:18:57] Challenges of Building Internal Data System 

She explains the challenges of building an internal data system for sales teams and how Pocus solves this problem.

[00:20:05] Building vs Buying 

Alexa Grabell discusses the benefits of purchasing software rather than building it internally, and how it empowers companies to have data at their fingertips.

[00:23:46] Investment from Design Partners 

Explains how early design partners were foundational to building Pocus, and how they became committed to the product, even becoming early angel investors.

[00:27:24] Creating a Category 

Alexa Grabell discusses the decision to create a new category for product-led sales and how it differs from traditional sales methods.

[00:28:32] Building a Community 

Alexa Grabell talks about the importance of building a community to help develop the product-led sales category and how it started as a small Slack group.

[00:39:12] Learning as a Founder 

Shel shares about her experience as a first-time founder and what she has learned about herself since starting Pocus.

[00:39:41] Empowering Others 

Alexa Grabell talks about his growth as a founder, including the importance of moving from executing only to empowering others to execute and how she has learned to get out of the weeds and empower her leadership team.

[00:43:00] Finding a Peer Group 

Alexa Grabell discusses how to build a peer group or find a coach. Alexa suggests seeking out founders in Slack communities, doing research, and asking for recommendations.

 [00:47:02] Passion and Trade-offs 

Alexa Grabell talks about the trade-offs he has made to pursue his passion and how it has impacted his personal life.

[00:49:15] Prioritizing Self-Care 

Alexa Grabell talks about the importance of prioritizing self-care and spending time with close-knit people to maintain creativity and productivity.

[00:54:40] Recruiting Process 

They discuss how Pocus screens for grit in the recruiting process, including written take-home assignments and references.

[00:56:17] Marketing as the First Hire 

Alexa Grabell talks about how she went against the norm and hired a head of marketing as the first hire on the business team, despite others telling her it was a stupid move.


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David Khim

David is co-founder and CEO of Omniscient Digital. He previously served as head of growth at People.ai and Fishtown Analytics, and before that was growth product manager at HubSpot where he worked on new user acquisition initiatives to scale the product-led go-to-market.