the gtm engineer The Last 15 Years in Sales & the Power of Cloud Employees with Gabe Larsen, CRO @ Signals
Gabe Larsen is CRO at Signals, a company selling cloud employees, AI teammates that do full jobs rather than single tasks. Gabe spent 2 years doing door to door sales in Germany before beginning his career in consulting and investment banking in New York and the Middle East. After that, he settled into SaaS where he joined InsideSales in 2013 when they were at $5M in ARR and helped them grow to north of $100M. The company was a pioneer in sales acceleration, building power dialers and training programs that helped companies shift from field sales to high velocity inside sales. After InsideSales, Gabe joined Kustomer, a Zendesk competitor, at $10M ARR. They grew quickly and got acquired by Meta for >$1B. He spent two years at Meta before getting spun out during their year of cuts in the name of efficiency. During that time, he saw how companies were being pushed to do more with less, but still relying on the old playbook of adding tools and adding people. That's what led him to reconnect with Dave Elkington, the founder of InsideSales, to start Signals.
In this podcast, we discuss:
* What the shift from field sales to inside sales taught Gabe about how industries evolve and why he’s betting cloud employees will drive the next shift toward autonomous organizations
* Some of the early marketing and sales playbooks that helped InsideSales go from $5 to $100M
* What separates AI agents from the cloud employees that Gabe and his team are building
* The win-loss cloud employee that’s already replaced expensive consulting firms
* How expectation setting with users gets them comfortable talking with AI employees
* Why framing them as cloud employees instead of AI agents changes how you collaborate with them
Episode highlights:
* Gabe distinguishes cloud employees from AI agents in three ways. 1). Cloud employees are autonomous rather than deterministic. They have access to tools and decide when to use them, rather than following strict if X then Y workflows. 2). They do full jobs rather than single tasks. For instance, an SDR cloud employee will handle anywhere between 20 to 300 tasks from setting up calls to running calls to sending gift cards after the call. 3). Cloud employees operate across multiple channels - phone, email, SMS, Slack, LinkedIn, and chat. A customer can chat with the cloud employee, and if they call 30 minutes later, it remembers the earlier conversation.
* Gabe explains that he runs weekly coaching sessions with four cloud employees that report to him. He reviews their output and gives feedback on things like email personalization and report building. By framing them as teammates rather than tools, it changes how organizations interact with them. Instead of setting up a workflow and forgetting about it, teams invest in improving the cloud employee over time, which compounds into better output and enables companies to do more with less.
* Gabe explains that the Signals win-loss cloud employee runs the entire deal analysis and reporting workflow better than the consulting firms he used to pay 25x to do the same thing. When a deal is lost, the cloud employee reaches out across email/phone/text to get an interview scheduled. Once the interview is scheduled, the cloud employee runs it (or can hand it off to a human), sends the interviewee a gift card, then ultimately writes up a report and shares it in Slack. After the report has been shared, sales leaders have a back and forth conversation with the cloud employee to dig deeper into findings across the many interviews it’s done.
* Gabe explains that implementing customer-facing AI personas was initially a challenge, and when Signals deployed a customer service cloud employee at a Fortune 500 company, they saw high hang-up rates. The fix was having the cloud employee open with honesty: “I’m an AI persona. I can get you to a human in five to ten minutes, but if you challenge me, you might be surprised.” That framing led customers to be more open to trying the AI experience. Many returned with positive feedback, saying the AI handled their questions better than junior reps would have.
* Gabe argues that SaaS tools are becoming limited because they’re building AI agents trapped inside their own platforms. Gong builds agents that only work in Gong. Apollo builds agents that only work in Apollo. He compares it to Siri, which can only access Apple apps and is locked out of everything else. Cloud employees are different because they’re cross-platform by design, just like real employees that move between Salesforce, Apollo, Gong, and Slack throughout their day. As a result, Gabe sees a shift coming where companies move from renting siloed tools, to hiring AI teammates that operate across their entire stack and compound over time.
Where to find Gabe:
* Signals
Transcript details:
(00:00) Intro and Gabe’s background
(06:04) What Signals does and the concept of cloud employees
(09:32) The history of InsideSales.com and the shift from outside to inside sales
(14:13) How InsideSales changed the way that modern selling works
(15:50) Assembly line sales and the formalization of the SDR role
(18:26) Category creation and research-based marketing at InsideSales.com
(20:38) Why Utah became a hub for sales talent
(24:32) How Signals landed on the cloud employee framing
(28:20) The four areas where cloud employees are deployed and how they differ from AI agents
(34:32) Deep dive on the win-loss cloud employee
(41:20) How to introduce customer-facing AI to prevent skepticism in audiences
(46:48) Other cloud employee use cases
(49:37) The revenue advisor cloud employee and ask-me-anything for sales teams
(52:34) Weekly coaching sessions with cloud employees and how to think about training them
(56:00) Gabe’s view on build vs. buy, why he thinks SaaS tools are dead and that the future is AI teammates
(01:00:43) Favorite underrated tool, growth hack, and conclusion
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