The way we work is changing. More importantly, the way people work together is changing.
The pandemic was a huge catalyst for this. Ideas that had been steadily gaining traction—flexible and remote work, asynchronous collaboration, work/life balance—suddenly saw five years of progress in five months.
Businesses rushed to adopt solutions. Face-to-face interactions were replaced with Zoom meetings, and formal and informal conversations moved to Slack or Teams.
But these first-wave fixes are a stop-gap. Tens of millions of people are experiencing the highs and lows of “the new world of work” and they’re asking: “What else is possible? Couldn’t this be better? Why are we still doing things this way?” The real change is still to come.
B2B sales depends on human connection 🤝
Human relationships have always been an important part of any customer-facing role. But building a personal connection is now harder than ever.
Face-to-face lunches and polished boardroom pitches are on the decline—and the stop-gap remedies don’t suffice. No one wants another Zoom meeting added to their calendar. And everyone’s inbox is already overflowing with emails and IMs.
“The ‘best product’ doesn’t always win—the best relationship does”
Your customers want to participate in a meaningful interaction—not a burdensome or impersonal exchange. They want to feel welcomed, supported and understood. They want to feel like they’re working together with another human being—in collaboration—to find a solution to their challenges.
Trust is essential during this process, and ultimately, your customers make their buying decision based on the level of trust they have in you. To put it another way—the success of any Sales rep or CS exec is determined by the quality of the customer relationships they’re able to build. The ‘best product’ doesn’t always win—the best relationship does.
Successful relationships rely on hard-earned knowledge 🧠
Rowan and I saw the value of these relationships first-hand as we helped scale revenue teams at Peakon on the way to a $700M acquisition.
The standout reps—those who consistently exceeded target, or had glowing CSAT scores across the board—were the ones who excelled at establishing a rapport with the customers they worked with.
They earned trust by being attentive and empathetic. They were quick to respond to questions, understood what customers wanted, and were proactive in offering solutions.
“The best reps had to learn what customers needed to know—and where to get the answers—the hard way”
But the ability to do this wasn’t a fluke, nor was it down to natural talent—it came from hard-earned knowledge.
The best reps got better by missing out on winnable deals and renewals. They had to learn what customers needed to know—and where to get the answers—the hard way.
“Essential knowledge was obscured from view—and it was hindering both the reps and the business”
The knowledge they were missing at the time already existed—in a document, in a tool, or in a coworker's head—but it was almost impossible to find when it was needed most.
Essential knowledge was obscured from view—knowledge that was key to building strong customer relationships—and it was hindering both the reps and the business.
Every team struggles with knowledge silos 😩
Knowledge shouldn’t have to be hard-won. And reps shouldn’t have to lose business to get better. However, it’s something that B2B teams have come to expect.
We believe there’s a solution—and it involves breaking down knowledge silos.
Let’s talk through the problem in three steps:
Content and answers could be anywhere 🤷♀️
Loom, Gong, Marketo, Docusign, Dropbox, GDrive, Slack—answers live everywhere, including inside people’s heads. So much valuable information is available but hidden—unless you know exactly what you’re looking for, exactly where to find it, or exactly who to ask. To solve this, you bring in a Content Management System (CMS) to function as “a single source of truth.” However…
CMSs can’t keep up 🏃♀️
They don’t work as promised. CMSs inevitably become outdated silos and create a huge maintenance burden. In any business, things are constantly changing and new knowledge is created every day—service options, marketing content, case studies, product features, internal processes, supporting documentation. Keeping a CMS up to date is an impossible task. Before long, everyone’s complaining that they’re still unable to find anything, and your expensive solution is poorly adopted. So people take it upon themselves to find a workaround, but…
The workarounds just don’t work 🤯
You can waste an hour or two clicking through shared platforms and folders without success. You could try turning to a colleague, but remote and hybrid work is making peer-to-peer knowledge sharing much harder. Or you could ask a question on Slack/Teams, with no guarantee you’ll get a response—and if you do, someone else will probably have the same question again a week later.
In all scenarios, knowledge remains obscured from view—there’s no record of knowledge discovery, and no opportunity for team-wide improvement. Worse, it means that when experienced reps leave, that experience leaves with them.
It’s no wonder Sales and CS reps struggle to find the answers they need to win deals and wow customers. The route to success is littered with setbacks and delays, and they’re forced to go it alone with workarounds that just don’t work.
Introducing Workbounce: the co-pilot for Sales teams 🧭
Rowan and I spent years frustrated by the lack of a good solution to these problems. And so, in early 2021, we founded Workbounce.
Workbounce is designed to be an insightful co-pilot for all customer-facing teams. We connect the siloed tools you use every day—like Google Drive, Notion and Slack—with a layer of intelligent search and analytics.
This means you spend less time digging through multiple platforms looking for answers, and more time building deal-winning relationships with your customers.
“The end goal of Workbounce is to provide a better experience to our customers’ customers”
Our mission is to redefine how people work together. And to do so, we have to be incredibly user-centric. Ultimately, we’re building a solution with the end goal of providing a better experience to our customers’ customers. If this sounds like an interesting problem to work on, then keep reading—we have many open roles.
Index Ventures leads our $2.7M seed round 🥳
When we started on this mission less than a year ago, we had a hunch we’d soon meet people who were just as excited by our vision as we were. And we didn’t have to wait long.
Rowan and I are incredibly proud to announce that we’re beginning 2022 with the support of the team at Index Ventures, who have led our $2.7M seed round.
We really couldn’t have picked a better partner. Index’s portfolio speaks for itself and it’s inspiring to be in such great company (Ayden, Confluent, Dropbox, Discord, Figma, Glossier, Notion, Roblox and Zendesk to name just a handful).
We’re also joined by a group of angel investors whose in-depth knowledge of B2B SaaS, Sales, and CS is sure to prove invaluable:
- Matthias Hilpert, Investor at MH2 Capital
- Harsh Sinha, CTO at Wise
- Simone Goodman, CFO at Forecast
- Kevin Van Grundy, CRO at Vercel
- Dan Rogers, co-founder and CPO at Peakon
- Christian Holm, co-founder and CTO at Peakon
- Samantha Wessels, VP EMEA at Snyk
- Jeetu Mahtani, EVP Customer Success at Hubspot
- Keiran Flanagan, SVP Marketing at Hubspot
But most importantly, we’re excited by those who are yet to join us on this journey. The majority of our seed round has been set aside to help us build a world-changing team, and we have many open positions, including:
- CTO
- Fullstack, Frontend and Backend Software Engineers
- Founding Designer
- Operations Manager
- anyone else who’s excited by our mission but doesn’t fit the roles above
If you’re looking for a new challenge in 2022, are inspired by what we’re doing, and want to be part of the journey, please get in touch.
Lastly, Rowan and I would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who has supported us so far—our friends, our families, and our customers. The knowledge you’ve shared and the relationships we’ve built together mean the world to us.