Intricately's CTO and co-founder Fima Leshinsky joins us to share how he built the authoritative source of cloud product adoption, usage, and spend insights--and what it really takes to map the cloud. Leshinsky shares the origins of Intricately, why cloud footprint data is so powerful, and how it empowers cloud sellers to accelerate their sales programs. He also discusses the history of cloud infrastructure, 2021 cloud market trends, and how today's cloud sellers can capitalize on where the cloud is headed.
Understanding How the Internet is Built
I realized not many people had the kind of visibility or tools or knowledge to understand what was really happening under the hood. And there was a lot happening under the hood...Sales and marketing teams lacked the insight of its ability around how technology was being used, and specifically, how cloud and infrastructure was being used. (1:52)
Everyone is either moved to the cloud, or has plans to move to the cloud. That certainly was not even in the conversation back in '05. (6:38)
The use cases I'm particularly excited about and the things that drive me to continue to innovate here is really around market sizing and segmentation.Because we have a really rich insight into behavior of infrastructure, we can do that (9:23)
Analyzing the Internet’s Digital DNA
What are the other things that we can see from the shadow that infrastructure casts?...Because we’re monitoring that kind of change in infrastructure configuration, and the provisioning of new infrastructure in different locations, we're able to see that growth; We're able to see that investment be made by those businesses. (11:56)
We catalog and track over 20,000 products today. And each of those products, it's like a bit of digital DNA...There's a SaaS or cloud product for every type of business need and we can see so many of those - and so that is a really rich source of information about the places where companies are investing. (16:16)
The combination of those two categories, product adoption, and then usage, and ultimately the spend that's attributed to that product is a really powerful combination. (17:30)
The Impact of COVID-19 on Cloud Adoption
It's really accelerated a trend that was already happening prior. But now, just as a result of both product and engineering, and business teams all being distributed, and working from home, this need for cloud and SaaS products to interoperate better with the communication and collaboration tools that we use. (18:50)
How Cloud Providers, Marketers & Sellers Compete to Win
Once you build software on an infrastructure platform, you're not taking it anywhere. It's going to stay there. And so, if you build a successful business from that, this is a long game that all of these cloud companies are playing. (23:57)
We saw about half a billion applications running around the world last year, that's nearly doubled in 12 months...because it's never been easier to launch and run an application. And it's never been cheaper, either. (28:13)
There's never been a bigger need for better tooling, better workflow solutions, better telemetry to help these sales and marketing teams be successful. (31:46)
Full Transcript
Sarah E. Brown 0:09
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Selling in the Cloud, a podcast about the business of cloud sales and marketing brought to you by Intricately, the authoritative source of product adoption, usage, and spend data for sales and marketing teams. I'm Sarah E. Brown, and I'm here with Michael Pollack. And we are your co-hosts.
Sarah E. Brown 0:39
Michael, welcome to the show.
Michael Pollack 0:40
Hi, Sarah. It's a pleasure to be here.
Sarah E. Brown 0:42
In this episode, we're speaking with Fima Leshinsky, who is the co founder and CTO of Intricately
Michael Pollack 0:49
My business partner, also my very good friend; so I'm wildly excited that Fima is joining us here today. I think, not only is he going to say smart things, he's really that smart in person, too. So it's exciting to have him on the show today.
Sarah E. Brown 1:00
Shall we get to it?
Michael Pollack 1:01
Absolutely. I'm excited to kind of kick things off by just asking Fima to tell us a little bit about your background, specifically, kind of the path that led you here, kind of your interest in technology, specifically, the technology led to Intricately. Kind of, if you could share with our audience, how we got to this, or how this all came to be?
Fima Leshinsky 1:23
Sure. Thanks for queuing that up, Mike, you know, my background largely is on the engineering and product side. I have a background in engineering, distributed systems, machine learning.
Fima Leshinsky 1:33
And I was really fortunate to join a large infrastructure company right out of school that most people have never heard of; a small company by the name of Akamai and really learned how cloud and infrastructure was being adopted and used to scale by enterprises around the world.
Fima Leshinsky 1:52
And that was the beginning of, you know, a thread that I pulled for a while to really understand the building blocks of both the internet and the applications that run on top of them. And from that, I realized, not many people had the kind of visibility or tools or knowledge to understand what was really happening under the hood. And there was a lot happening under the hood. And so there was this interesting phenomenon that I saw in the infrastructure space, specifically, where business teams and sales and marketing teams were entirely just, they lacked the insight of its ability around how technology was being used, and specifically, how cloud and infrastructure was being used.
Fima Leshinsky 2:42
And so that was really the beginning of the end for me, where I had always wanted to start a company; I was in Silicon Valley and wanted to build a product. And at that point, I saw the opportunity to do so. And so, yeah, that was the beginnings of me starting to explore how can I ultimately bring something to market that could provide that visibility and transparency to the business world around hot technology, and infrastructure was being adopted worldwide,
Michael Pollack 3:12
Fima to go back to your time at Akamai for the audience listening, do you mind giving us – without necessarily putting you in position to date yourself entirely - but, you just talked about the time period at which you were at Akamai? What was the state of the internet at that moment in time? And how much has it changed today in 2020? I think it'd be helpful to talk just a little bit about what was the cutting edge then and where we are today? And maybe just to share some context there for audience.
Fima Leshinsky 3:37
Yeah, that's a great question. I don't want to get these dates wrong. But I want to say, you know, had a couple of cents of joy coming out of grad school. And so it was probably around, you know, oh, '07, '08, somewhere around there.
Fima Leshinsky 3:50
And, you know, it was an incredible period of growth during my initial four years at Akamai where you got to see the beginnings of video platforms come to life and online gaming companies - it was really the kind of very early stages of .com but there was enough maturity there. We had passed the .com bubble, I was still in college at that time. And so, you know, there were real businesses, real exciting growth and adoption across social media and the social network space.
Fima Leshinsky 4:28
So you know, Facebook was really kicking into gear as were, you know, all of the other kind of social networks and related platforms coming online. And so, it was a period of tremendous growth. And you know, I don't think it has stopped, frankly, I think it's just continued as technologies have evolved and business models have evolved.
Michael Pollack 4:52
So when you think about that, and you think about 2007, fast forwarding to today, and I'd say obviously video being a massive thing that's different. I'm curious just to have you unpack a little bit about how you've, I guess, and to some extent, you're also a customer of cloud infrastructure as an engineering leader. But cloud infrastructure does exist today, when you were part of that company in 2007, were you even dealing with that? Were customers even talking about that yet?
Michael Pollack 5:20
Or maybe the biggest customers were, but it hadn't really kind of, like, percolated broadly, like...again, for our audience in 2007, taking maybe Facebook as a, for example, they were still like on co-load infrastructure at that moment in time, they had made the leap to their own data centers. Can you travel this back to that period of time and share kind of what things look like at that moment?
Fima Leshinsky 5:41
Yeah, it's so funny on my LinkedIn actually looking at when I started at Akamai, it was actually in 2005. So like, you know, at that time, everything was there, like cloud was there, AWS was there. But when you asked, you know, were people talking about it, mostly engineers, were talking about it, mostly tech people were talking about...the cloud was not at that point in time something that was a marketing term being thrown around everywhere. It wasn't, you know, what the world kind of looks like today.
Fima Leshinsky 6:16
And so while the technology was there, and companies, especially no forward-leaning companies in Silicon Valley and beyond, were just on a race to kind of out-innovate each other and out-adopt each other with respect to cloud. Certainly, I think, you know, they were still the minority.
Fima Leshinsky 6:38
It's interesting, you know, when you're in that group, in that bubble, you know, you think everyone is kind of doing it. But the reality is, it was, I think, a select few were, if you look at, you know, 10 years, 15 years later, now, you can say with a lot more confidence that, OK, everyone understands what cloud is. Everyone is either moved to the cloud, or has plans to move to the cloud. That certainly was not even in the conversation back in '05.
Sarah E. Brown 7:06
You know, Fima, something I've heard you talk about is maturity among sales and marketing teams sell to cloud buyers in terms of their adoption of data and understanding of product adoption, usage and spend data.
Sarah E. Brown 7:17
And I'm curious, back in the day, when people were tapping you on the shoulder at Akamai, asking you to answer some of these questions before Intricately existed? How did you even explain how these folks should think about it? Were they thinking about it correctly, and just didn't know the data existed? And I'd also love to hear how you've seen that evolve as the industry has matured?
Fima Leshinsky 7:36
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I wish that I had Intricately back in those days, because, you know, the answers that I, or, perhaps other engineers were able to give were really not particularly exciting or satisfactory.
Fima Leshinsky 7:50
There was no way to get a comprehensive view into someone's digital presence. There was no way to map out all of the physical infrastructure and all of the data center points-of-presence that a company was operating. You really had to deploy a substantial amount of technology in order to get that kind of view, which is, you know, effectively what we have done at Intricately.
Fima Leshinsky 8:15
But, you know, at that time, it was a very kind of rudimentary, ad hoc type of analysis that was being conducted. You had very limited tooling. You pretty much did that from one location. And so what was eye-opening is that even that right, even such a kind of, let's call it a poor man's version of Intricately at that time, delivered such great value to the business team that was, you know, really desperate to get some kind of a edge in the next conversation with their customer that, you know, that was the thing that really attracted me to that problem where I saw, wow, like, this is actually making a difference. This allows that particular sales team to, you know, craft a proposal that is just a lot more relevant, as opposed to coming in dark.
Sarah E. Brown 9:09
I love what you just said, there, you started talking about the, sort of, how is this data actionable? And I'm curious, as you've built Intricately, as you've built out the platform, you know, what are the actions that people can do with this data that maybe they couldn't do before?
Fima Leshinsky 9:23
Wow. I mean, there's a lot of use cases that we power. And c So, being able to take advantage of the entire data set that we have, and looking at the opportunity of Southeast Asia or the growth that's happening in Latin America, and being able to segment by different verticals or different sizes of businesses. So those kinds of sizing and segmentation use cases.
Fima Leshinsky 9:59
It's something that I find to be very exciting and something you just cannot do unless you have a combination of the breadth of data that we have, as well as the depth of insights.
Fima Leshinsky 10:11
But some of the more operational or let's say tactical use cases are really interesting as well, right? So, for example, being able to target prospects with relevant messaging and, you know, messaging that really resonates and gets them to feel as if you really understand their business, that's something that I could have only dreamed of back in '05. And, because we have the ability to understand what applications are doing. And in addition to the different products that power them have a really rich insight into behavior of infrastructure, we can do that. And so hopefully, that gives you a taste of both kind of, you know, strategic operational use cases that we can do with the data as well as more kind of tactical field level execution.
Michael Pollack 11:06
That's awesome.
Michael Pollack 11:07
Fima, I want to just touch on something I know you and I talked about at length. But for many businesses that sell things in the physical world, they might evaluate things like firmographics and demographics to understand the shape or the size of a business. But in the digital world, many of our customers and businesses increasingly today are consuming technology in ways that, to some extent, tell you what their business is. The orchestration and construction and execution of that technology footprint, tells you an enormous amount about that business, I'd love for you to just share with our audience, some ideas there, and just how you think about this notion that has a business' ability to consume technology changes what that tells us about a business or how we see that anything you could share there, I think would be awesome.
Fima Leshinsky 11:56
Yeah, I mean, this really kind of dovetails nicely into: What are the other things that we can see from the shadow that infrastructure casts? And, you know, there's a lot of things. So, for example, one thing that I like to use as an example is being able to see how businesses are able to expand into new markets.
Fima Leshinsky 12:17
Oftentimes now, when a product launches, or when a new market opens up for a business, let's say, a domestic company decides that they want to expand into Europe, for a particular line of business. There is both digital and at times physical infrastructure that is deployed in those locations. And, because we're monitoring that kind of change in infrastructure configuration, and the provisioning of new infrastructure in different locations, we're able to see that growth; We're able to see that investment be made by those businesses.
Fima Leshinsky 12:55
Another really kind of interesting set of insights that we can see as a result of infrastructure changing is, you talked about the delivery of video, or just video, in general, there is a life cycle that occurs where companies first start using CDN to deliver content.
Fima Leshinsky 13:16
And then at some point, when they kind of exceed the capacity of their CDN provider, perhaps it becomes too costly for them to do that, they start doing some of that themselves. And so we can see, as companies start to provision new data center locations, and new points of presence, and basically, delivery infrastructure, they operate themselves as they cut to using a content delivery provider as a secondary, or as a fallback provider and start to deliver content themselves.
Fima Leshinsky 13:49
So you know, those are two very different types of examples. AWS is a behemoth in the space of cloud. And I would argue, even in data center, even though they don't play there, they just influence that market so much. And so I would be remiss if I didn't mention AWS in the conversation.
Fima Leshinsky 14:10
And so being able to see, you know, how a business is growing, their AWS investment, the types of products that they're relying on to deliver their applications and experiences to their customers. That's another really kind of powerful insight into how a business' evolving, growing and adopting new technologies. So this is something I could talk about forever. But hopefully, this gives just a taste of the kinds of things we were able to see.
Michael Pollack 14:38
It does. And my hope is that helps crystallize for our audience some of the ways our product gets put to work, but there's something you said in there that I think is worth pulling out and unpacking a little bit further, which is the ability to understand what a business is doing by changes its making to its infrastructure.
Michael Pollack 14:55
So an analogy here that I imagine most of our listeners will easily comprehend. If you drive by a business, and the business is adding a second story, or they're doubling the size of their warehouse, we can all kind of like logically assume something's going well, or they're investing or there's some growth happening there. In the digital world, you can't see that.
Michael Pollack 15:16
And so, Fima, what I'd love to ask you: What are some of the ways that materializes, what are some of the ways that Intricately is able to see that? And I think you touched on a few. But I think that's a fascinating thing that most of our listeners, and some of our customers don't even fully understand how much signal is actually out there on this.
Fima Leshinsky 15:35
Yeah. And specifically, you're asking about the decline of businesses or the growth of them? Or give me just a little bit more guidance on where you'd like me to focus there?
Michael Pollack 15:46
My answer would be, yes. Right. I'd love for you to just share a little bit about what are some of the ways businesses are telegraphing their intentions, by moves in their infrastructure, and how is Intricately able to see that.
Fima Leshinsky 15:57
So there's a couple of categories of, I would just say, behavior or technology adoption, that have a really rich source of signal that you can use to better understand how a business is growing over time.
Fima Leshinsky 16:16
One of those categories is product adoption, we catalog and track over 20,000 products today. And each of those products, it's like a bit of digital DNA, that a business has. And so as a business adopts new products, or stops using products that they purchased previously, that tells you a lot about the direction that a business is moving in the investments that a business is making.
Fima Leshinsky 16:45
And because those products, increasingly are point solutions, very kind of specifically designed products–to just give concrete examples: Salesforce, and sales enablement tools, or Marketo. And marketing automation solutions down to you know, back office solutions, such as, you know, Workday, or, you know, Gusto or Zenefits, right? There's a SaaS or cloud product for every type of business need and we can see so many of those - and so that is a really rich source of information about the places where companies are investing.
Fima Leshinsky 17:30
You know, another category of signal is what we call application demand. And really, what we're talking about here is application traffic. This allows us to size the relationship between products, the companies that adopt them, and then the software and the applications that companies are developing.
So that's a really important secondary category to understand signal, because it's one thing to say, Hey, you know, this particular product is being used, but an entirely other thing to quantify that and say, Hey, wow, the adoption of this product, or the usage of this product, has increased two or three times faster than the adoption within that company's peer group. So I think the combination of those two categories, product adoption, and then usage, and ,ultimately, spend that's attributed to that product is a really powerful combination.
Sarah E. Brown 18:28
Given the last year and changes in cloud, what's something that you would highlight in terms of opportunities for cloud sellers or areas of the industry, like you mentioned CDN, where you're seeing exciting things happening that could potentially benefit people listening to the show who might sell in that space?
Fima Leshinsky 18:44
Yeah, this year has been just absolutely surreal for a couple of reasons.
Fima Leshinsky 18:50
But, you know, the biggest thing that COVID has done for the industry, and I say that intentionally, it's something that it's done for the industry. It's really accelerated a trend that was already happening prior. But now, just as a result of both product and engineering, and business teams all being distributed, and working from home, this need for cloud and SaaS products to interoperate better with the communication and collaboration tools that we use.
And so, you know, everything from supporting application deployment workflows, to how teams are notified or alerted or receive visibility into the health of their products and applications. There is now a really clear separation happening between products that really take that consideration around communication and collaboration and treat that as a first class citizen with this They're kind of feature suite. And those products that just are a little late to the game.
Fima Leshinsky 20:06
And so it's actually been, I think...really a wonderful development for the consumers of those products. And so that's everything from sales and marketing teams to customer success to product and engineering, where the leading tools and solutions in the marketplace are continuing to deliver just, I think, great experiences, and I'm thinking of products, like, the Slacks and the Zooms of the world where, you know, if you're hiring, our talent management system isn't integrated with those communication channels, then they're not gonna end up being very successful in the long term.
Michael Pollack 20:53
I think that's right. And I'd love to get your perspective, Fima. As someone who is a technical leader in creating new product, but also a technical buyer, right? I mean, we spend six figures, probably seven figures a year on our infrastructure, in your view, is there anything? And maybe it's COVID? Or maybe it's more broadly, but is there anything that's surprising to you, or has surprised you or has evolved in a way you want to anticipate it?
Michael Pollack 21:20
Obviously, COVID is a unique event. And there's certain areas where it's kind of pulled through some existing trends and accelerated them. But maybe it's not just limited to COVID. But more broadly, as you sit tight on your purview, is there anything that you're really kind of whether its head scratching about or surprised by or is just a unique thing that is just strange, whether it's wearing your 'I'm a buyer of technology' hat, or I'm a, I'm an innovator around building kind of a system that enables large businesses to kind of complete their marketing and sales activities, anything in particular that jump out for you?
Fima Leshinsky 21:52
You know, the thing that has really surprised me this year, and it's, again, always been the case, but for some reason, I felt it more this year than before, is this war that is being fought amongst the Amazons, the Google's the Microsoft's of the world for wallet share of enterprises, SMBs, and startups, right.
Fima Leshinsky 22:18
At first, and this probably started happening...You know, I remember when AWS started giving out large amounts of credits. And I'm sure it's happened before I remembered it, but it was when you know, you and I really started spending money on infrastructure. And we saw and felt just courtship that was happening in Silicon Valley and beyond, where AWS would be knocking on our door and saying, Hey, you know, here's 100 K, or here's a quarter million dollars or the credits that we want you to build on us.
Fima Leshinsky 22:54
I thought that was just kind of a flashpoint in time if that wasn't something that would continue. But in fact, it seems like that's only accelerated and grown, where, you know, now, Azure and the maturity of their platform, as well as GCP and Google, you know, they are stepping up and coming to the plate.
Fima Leshinsky 23:16
And, so, I guess it makes sense that that's now accelerating, because there's just more competition at play. But yeah, I don't know if that's somehow tied to COVID or not, I doubt it. But I am seeing that war for not just as mindshare, but and it's not wallet share, either. It's so interesting. It's really share of applications, right?
Fima Leshinsky 23:38
It's come build on our platform - we'll pay you to do that. And it makes sense for them to take that approach and perspective, because once you build software on an infrastructure platform, you're not taking it anywhere. It's going to stay there.
Fima Leshinsky 23:57
And so, if you build a successful business from that, this is a long game that all of these cloud companies are playing. And so, you know, that's just never been clear to me now, as we see it, you know, some success in our business at six figure, pushing up the seven figure spend. It's interesting, just the relationships that are forming between developers and these cloud platforms.
Michael Pollack 24:22
You know, when you talk about the clouds, there's a book I read many years ago, I think it's Wizards of Lightning [Empires of LIght], I don't know, we'll post it in the show notes. And I'll get the correct title. But it talks about the battle between at the time what was effectively General Electric and Westinghouse and, like, the fight for who would become kind of a power company, right?
Michael Pollack 24:41
And the battle between these competing standards. And there's many parallels, I think, to the modern cloud universe, but I guess if I were to just pull out one comment you made in particular, if any folks are listening from large cloud providers, we spend a lot we're open to more credits. So I just want to make sure I give that plug out to our potential audience.
Michael Pollack 25:02
But, going back to a question for you here, Fima, as you think about that, as you look at this notion that once you move to cloud, you kind of never move back, right? It's one-way door, and we're experiencing that in our own business. Can you comment on how that's playing out? For the companies we monitor for the businesses we see worldwide and what that trend is leading to longer term, right? Can you contextualize that for our audience? So how much scale you're talking about how fast is it happening and how, how much is moving through this door, that probably is never going to get closed?
Fima Leshinsky 25:35
It's interesting. So, actually, the lifecycle of companies going to the cloud, and going back to the data center is a very real thing. So it's not that once you go to the cloud, you're never going anywhere else. It's that the applications that you end up building, whether that's in the cloud, or the data center, it's just it's such a challenging thing to move them.
Fima Leshinsky 26:02
And so what you end up seeing is those applications that were already built, tend to stay put, not always, but most of the time tend to stay put. Because the cost of lifting those applications and moving them elsewhere is too high. But new applications will end up being deployed in other configurations.
And just like the example, I mentioned at the front of our conversation around how you know, when the cost of cloud becomes too high, the move back to data center, or just the move to data center becomes a real thing, that is something that we see across the market, it tends to happen with either really fast growing mid-market companies, or more likely enterprises.
Fima Leshinsky 26:54
But you know, cloud is this really interesting thing where it's really easy to get started, there is a tremendous amount of tooling and maturity that is built into that product. But it does come with a cost.
Fima Leshinsky 27:08
And so, when you have some success on a provider, like AWS, you really feel that pain, and certainly credits will help. But you know, I think that life cycle, especially in the enterprise, is one that we have a really unique visibility into.
Fima Leshinsky 27:29
And, you know, the numbers that we're talking about at that scale, are in the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars. And so, you know, that's a very real thing that they contend with. You know, in terms of scale, just thinking about the number of kind of businesses and applications that are being launched every month, and the rate at which cloud is being adopted, that is actually continuing to accelerate.
Fima Leshinsky 28:02
You know, you asked about, are there anything that I found to be surprising? You know, of course, it makes sense that there's tremendous growth there. But the kind of growth is pretty spectacular.
Fima Leshinsky 28:13
We saw about half a billion applications running around the world last year, that's nearly doubled in 12 months. And so, yep, pretty mind boggling just the pace with which things are growing. But it makes sense, because it's never been easier to launch and run an application. And it's never been cheaper either. way.
Michael Pollack 28:38
So just to be really crisp on that for our audience, when you say that number has doubled, can you articulate what specifically has doubled? And how big of a deal that really is?
Fima Leshinsky 28:46
You know, so when I talk about applications, this is something that we have a really unique view into an application, it's just a piece of software that is connected to the internet. I mean, that is our definition of application simply because it's not connected to internet. We don't see it. And so, you know, I imagine there's a substantial amount of applications which we don't see, but of the applications that we do see, I mean, how big of a deal is it?
Fima Leshinsky 29:18
I mean, it just speaks to, again, as I said, it's it speaks to the ease of anyone, pretty much now, you don't even need a credit card, right? You can with a few clicks launch an application, you can run it on a free service, right? Heroku a very popular path solution that is now under Salesforce. You know, they offer what they call hobby, dinos, which are just free infrastructure. And this trend is just another way to give credits, right. This is happening everywhere.
Fima Leshinsky 29:53
And so I think it's it's a big deal just because it shows us that, you know, I don't think we're anywhere close to the top here, it still feels like this world of cloud is in its infancy. And that is probably the biggest surprise because, you know, 15 years ago, I could say that was a great confidence. But I don't think I'm any less confident they say that today.
Sarah E. Brown 30:06
Well, Fima, that's awesome. Thank you so much for sharing these insights. For those listening Around this time, this episode will go live, we are publishing intricate Lee's annual State of application deployment landscape report. So we'll have more insights, similar to what Fima is talking about now.
Sarah E. Brown 30:39
My last question, Fima, and again, we could all talk all day. But ,curious if you have any parting advice to marketing and sales folks who are listening to this – given where you sit in the industry where you sit in your role and Intricately – if you could give any advice to anyone listening? What would that be?
Fima Leshinsky 30:54
The world is changing out from under us. I think that, you know, what we have grown to kind of accept as reality or best practices is, you know, just like the pace with which cloud is accelerating...I think the challenges of executing on go to market strategies, or just field-level sales execution, I think that's getting harder, as well.
Fima Leshinsky 31:25
And it's simply because this gap between what is happening in the digital universe versus what's happening in, let's say, in the physical universe, when it comes to sales and marketing teams trying to use the existing tools they have to execute on their initiatives. I think that that gap is widening.
Fima Leshinsky 31:46
And so, there's never been a bigger need for better tooling, better workflow solutions, better telemetry to help these sales and marketing teams be successful. Of course, we play squarely in that space and we're very passionate about helping those teams. But what I would say is, you know, the days of just relying on Excel spreadsheets and conversations that Sales or perhaps Marketing is having with prospects to inform those teams of both, you know, long term and short term strategies are over.
Fima Leshinsky 32:24
And data is the kind of the new oil in that industry. And so, you know, whether it's data that those teams have amassed over the years, or data that we're able to provide, everything has turned to be global and mobile and so you have to take a broad view that's data-oriented and data-driven to be successful in this market.
Sarah E. Brown 32:51
Awesome.Thank you so much, Fima. And we'll direct folks to learn more about your work at Intricately.com.
Fima Leshinsky 32:56
Thanks a lot, Sarah. This was wonderful.
Sarah E. Brown 32:58
Mike, any parting words before we let Fima go?
Michael Pollack 33:01
No, Fima, thank you for joining us today. I think this was great. I think you gave some some really useful insight that my hope is our audience can learn something from but I think there's a number of subtopics inside of here, I think will take some time to unpack in the future.
Michael Pollack 33:14
I think, you know, the context of where things have come from, I think is really helpful for people to be able to understand where things could go. And I think your experiences as a participant in the space and increasingly as a buyer of technology, I think are highly relevant to our audience, so I I'm very excited to unpack that in future conversations.
Michael Pollack 33:34
But, again, always a pleasure to spend time with you to have you join us. And so thank you for taking the time today. I hope our audience enjoyed the conversation as much as I know we did.
Fima Leshinsky 33:44
This was a lot of fun. Thank you both and looking forward to the next one.
Michael Pollack 33:47
Well, that's it for us.This episode may be over but we can continue the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #sellinginthecloud. On Twitter. I'm @MRPollack,
Sarah E. Brown 33:57
And I'm @SEBMarketing.
Michael Pollack 33:59
Thank you to everyone for joining us on this episode of Selling in the Cloud, brought to you by Intricately, the authoritative source of digital product, adoption, usage and spend data for cloud sales and marketing teams.
Michael Pollack 34:12
If you liked the show, head on over to iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts, and please give us a review. We appreciate it. Until next time.
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