meet you as well. Yeah, don't think we've connected yet, but I'm cheapest out here at Korea, so it's a pleasure to meet you.
Great. Very nice to meet
you. Where are you based at? You're in SF or
I know I'm in New Jersey. New Jersey.
I was born in Philadelphia, so I'm very familiar with the NJ area. Yeah.
When did you leave?
I left Philly 10 years ago, so I spent some time, but I spent a lot of time in willingboro. Are you familiar with the area of New Jersey? No,
is that South?
I believe it is south. Yeah, we spent a lot of time over there. I just noticed a lot of highways. That's all I really remember.
Sounds about, right? And you're in San Francisco?
No, I'm in Atlanta. Yeah, okay,
okay, hi, Deb, it's nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you. Jen, I hope you're feeling better. I know you were a little down.
I'm still, I'm like, coughing still, but I had pneumonia, which is such a random thing to get, and it like, it literally knocked me out. It was, it was awful. It was awful, awful. Um, but I, I was on like, a million medicines and steroids and stuff. And I'm, I'm like, 90 98% I still am coughing a little bit, but yeah, so I'm sorry about that. I was just, oh,
it's still me. Oh my gosh. I'm glad you're feeling better. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Because, I mean, we hear of covid and all, like, lesser of covid, but like, pneumonia, like, oh my gosh, so random.
Yeah, so it's very nice to meet you guys. I'm glad I was able to join today.
Wonderful, amazing. I see Priya on
Hi guys. How's it going
good? How are you good?
Jen and I were just on a call, and my computer overheated and shut down completely. So I'm on my phone while it takes its time, like, to, like, have some like, I don't know, maybe I should get it a cold drink or something. I don't know, Friday. It's
like, listen, I walked in. Yeah, it's Friday,
yeah.
It's like, it's like, I'm out. I've had enough, but, but, yeah, I actually wanted you guys to take Jen through some of the initial conversations that we had. So I will be silent. I gave her a good overview, but I feel like she needs to, sort of like, see the digital sales room and all of that stuff. So it would be so good if you could do that 100%
and Jen, like, again, open conversation. Just push the word, introduce us. So like chat. So I'll do a short product demo that you can ask us any questions through the through the process. So I'm deboshree Dutta. I actually grew up in India. I'm a computer nerd. Study computer science when a Carnegie Mellon, so I'm not familiar with Philly, but very much the Pittsburgh area. I have a 412 number. And anyway, I started my career at Microsoft as an engineer 15 years
did I? Did I tell you that I grew up in Pittsburgh? Did we have this conversation? No, but
you saw that I had a 412, number, and you recognized it and it, but we didn't chat about it. Oh
yeah, I love Pittsburgh. I grew up in Pittsburgh, So, but anyway, go ahead.
Oh my gosh, yes, we should. I was a student there, so I grew up in Shadyside, and have very different memories. But yeah,
anyway, so I well, I lived. I so I was not, I was not a college student, but I lived on the Pitt campus. Actually, our apartment, my dad was a student. Our apartment was across all of the fraternities on Myron Avenue. So you know how my childhood was.
We need to have a whole other conversation, like Friday afternoon with a glass of wine. Yeah.
Anyway, so last long story short, I mean, so basically, I was head of product at PayPal, Jen, so my experience is very much in working with businesses. I led our entire AI product strategy at PayPal for customer success experiences. Long story short, the bug caught me for startups. I quoted the first version of crea, put it out there. It was more of a consumer product at the time. Had 600 users. We went through Y Combinator, got venture backed, and so on. And here we are. I want to briefly introduce Jonathan.
Hey, nice to meet you. Jennifer, of course, I already told him Chief of Staff here, but my background is heavily in sales. So I started off in technology, worked as an AE, spent some time in the HR space as a consultant. I also built a startup last year. We were a B to B HR tech platform, and we went through TechStars. So that was an awesome opportunity, and I joined TechStars, not Texas, Korea, about three and a half months ago. So I focused on everything on the growth side, essentially sales and then also customer success. So we bring on new organizations. I ensure that they're ready to rock and roll. So it's nice to meet you. Jennifer,
awesome. Very nice to meet you guys. I guess I'll give you a little introduction about myself as well. I have been with Priya at PFG for about two years. I we, we are a small but mighty team, as I'm sure Priya has told you. We I've been helping Priya on both marketing and client services, so doing a lot of business development. We've been working on, you know, working on our CRM and making sure, you know, we've got our pipeline, and all of that kind of stuff. My background actually is pretty diverse, primarily in marketing and business development. So I've worked in a couple different fields. I've worked in fashion, food and industrial gas, so it's pretty diverse. So yeah, so I'm, I'm very happy to be here. I really love being on the agency side. I'm, you know, really happy to be here, and I'm excited to see like, what you guys can offer us. You know, we're always looking to optimize our processes, and, you know, streamline and and really, like, make, make things as efficient and basically easy as possible for the team internally. So, you know, we've talked about Korea before. I know Priya has, you know, she's, she's given me, like, a lot of the information, but I'm, like, super excited to see, like, what crea can do for us at PFG
totally, and that's really helpful context. So what I'll do is I'll share a little bit more about just the vision of what we do, and then hone in a little bit more on the specific use case Miss Park spoke about. But know that there's breadth of opportunity here and in all the different areas that you guys are thinking of optimizing around. So crea is basically, it's a content platform. End of the day, it's basically an AI content platform for both creating your content, managing your content, sharing your content essentially. And while you can create a breadth of types of assets, whether it's presentations, pitch decks, one pagers and so on, I'll speak more specifically to the sales room conversation, but then we can talk about how we can even go beyond that. Okay, so let me know when you're able to see my screen. I'll keep this short, I promise,
yep, now I can see it perfect. Okay, so our whole objective
is, as is with your businesses, as with us. A lot of you know what we're dealing with is a lot of buyer competition, right? So our objective is, how do we essentially boost engagement with the buyer by having more personalized content that feels more curated for them. So at cria, what we do is we specialize on like effortlessly creating on brand, interactive and trackable professional assets really fast, objective being. You want to captivate those your prospects stand out from the competition, and boost that engagement with the buyer so you know this, right? Like, when you pitch a client, you know the buyer is, like, like, Jennifer is is out right now, we want to come back and, like, it's two weeks, it could take two months. It could take much longer to close, right? And you guys work with big pharma, like Pfizer and so on. So these are long, long prospective, like calls. So it's really important that we keep you know your buyers engaged through this journey. And traditionally, what we are likely doing today sending them emails and PowerPoints and like links and social proof things are going to keep the conversation going, to like, help them through the buyer journey. But as you know, like, marketing is about going broad. Sales is about how much more personalized can this get, so that they are seeing exactly what they need to take them through the funnel. So long story short, what we're dealing with is, you know, buyers have hundreds of options end of the day, and you guys go through the RFP process, so knowing already that you're being pitched against competition, they're obviously going to do some research on their end. So they're likely going to your website or looking at other places where they can get that conviction. It's not necessarily personalized, so they can see drop offs. Now, obviously the point being that in our case as well, like, if I'm pitching your company right, it would be great if there's a way to convince pfgmed that we work with other companies which are in this space, like consulting businesses, marketing businesses, and only have social proof and so on that's relevant to that. So you're not kind of getting lost among the sea of information. So what we have recommended is the idea of virtual spaces, okay? These are basically these buyer micro sites, and you can have related assets with them, right? So what you're doing is you're combining resources that are, let's say, relevant, just for Pfizer to see, right? That would help them through the buyer journey. So you can aggregate your sales content, you can even summarize your follow ups, maybe through a call summary and things like that. And you can track engagement across the board with a single platform. I'll give you some examples. In a nutshell, what we're trying to do is we can have these buyer portals where you can personalize, let's say, a pitch deck, or provide a standard pitch deck, but it's in this personalized experience where there's links to miss passing demos or testimonials from your customers, social proof and so on. You can track engagement on every asset, whether it's this landing page, it's individual assets that you've sent to them, all of this so they spend some time on pricing. You will get to know you can drive that active follow up through. And AI is at the heart of this. And as a marketer, this would be, this is kind of where the essence is. A lot of the content, essentially can be curated easily with AI, and I'll share that in a second. So here's just an example of what a simple microsite would look like. Okay, we work with this company called Up Squad. They essentially pitch into four or five different verticals. Okay? So an example being upsquad is like a software company, but they pitch to they buy verticals, our schools, government agencies, and, I think nonprofits or something like so then Deb, like for us, we want to have, like, a simple, curated experience. Let's say that we would send to schools. It's a link like this. So the sales team. Once it's portals put together, the sales team just replaces the logo of the client, adds like that, HubSpot link or something like that. The rest of it is ready to go. So links to like all the logos of customers, which are in the schools, the university, vertical link to a product deck that's maybe standard or maybe verticalized for them, a case study that's relevant for this use case alone, pricing. Because oftentimes what happens is the buyer goes and you're like, Okay, here's like, 17 case studies, right? Like, they just need to see the one or two that's relevant for them. Other stuff in here, maybe couple of testimonials videos that's relevant to this use case. And again, just link, you know, to them, like book, a demo and so on. So the idea being that if we have some of these pre curated, uh, microsites, it's easy, and the bio feels like it's a more experience, more personalized experience. Can take it a step further, which is where the AI comes in a little bit more. Let's you have a call transcript, or let's just take notes from a call, right? You can even add a section saying, Hey, here's like an executive summary, right? Just drop those bullet points in here. It'll generate it in the exact format you want it to. So for example, you want bullet points on the left, you want like a blurb on the right, it'll generate it for you, right? And it's going to be like marketing ready language, so that it's not, it's wordsmithing. You're limiting the wordsmithing. Another example being, I'll share another one. So in and essentially like you can upload, once you create, like these landing pages, you can upload any of your assets, a PowerPoint deck, a PDF, a data sheet, any of your pricing, any of these things, right? So you can have all of this and kind of put it together in a data room, kind of concept, and send it over to your bio. You get tracking analytics on every stage, every every asset. So for example, for this bridge, IT consulting group that we worked with, we can track every time someone has come and visited them, where they spent time, both at the high level as well as at an individual asset level. Okay? And we envision this really as, like a full cycle, right? Like it's going from the first time the buyer hears about you to follow ups as there's more interest to signing a proposal, even with your pricing link and FAQs contracts, all the way to possibly, in your case, if there's any kind of onboarding or renewals, things like that, right? Maybe I'll move through this a little bit quickly. So what, when we come, when we engage with the with the client, what we typically do is we actually try to understand your your buyer journey, right? Because it varies for everybody. Broadly. We're trying to understand what are the app, what are the assets you use at each phase, right? So from lead to prospect, maybe there's a pitch deck, maybe there's a case study when they become an opportunity. Maybe there's a there's a deep dive, things like that. We just sort of map these out. These are more detailed than they need to be. And then we'll help, like, curate templates. So there's a bunch of templates that are already in the system. You can easily start with those, but we'll work with you to curate, like, at least one template to get started with. And the way it works is, like, you just program your branding in, okay, you can upload your colors. And once that's programmed in, literally any asset that you create, after that will automatically pick it up. So you're kind of not dealing with any more, like branding setup and things like that. And like I said, any net new content, if it's a new presentation or anything that you want to create, you can just drop in bullet points. You're never going to worry about your run on sentences. It's going to build it in a way that you want it to right, like, whether it's a problem statement, solution, all that. Then the designer is the is the other part of the AI that I want to talk about, which is, once you have your branding program in late so let's say you want, like, let's say one also create a grid. So the AI also will generate a grid, kind of a response where you have like a problem statement, you have three with, like a heading and a subheading which fits in the box, things like that. But also the branding colors will be such that if the background, if you want to switch the background to a dark green, it'll automatically adjust the shades of the the, you know, these boxes, the hover buttons, everything. So it'll automatically take care of it so you're not dealing with formatting stuff. It's kind of a huge time saver, and always looks good, basically. And you can swap images out with videos as an icon library. All that stuff is baked in. There's other stuff. Like, you can build an entire page, like a whole presentation. So like you wanted to have, it'll come up with a structure you can replace this saying, exact summary first, then maybe I want problem statement, solution, something, something. These are all prompts to the AI. You can drop, like, an entire, like, like, big bunch of document documentation in here. It'll go off. It'll do its best to come up with, you know, like an entire asset for you. Again, I always say, like, this is a great place to start. But then you can, you know, edit each of these sections the same way, with just like, controlling each slide edition other stuff, like, you can password protect like, specific assets, maybe is a contract that's been sent. You can password protect it. You can also capture email right of people who are coming in, just like, Doc send, essentially, right? Yep, but yeah, like, there's a huge opportunity like, measure engagement, see which of these are converting into opportunities so you can reuse and surface those types of content ahead of time. Revenue, impact, adoption, rate of like, these assets, these are more relevant, likely for larger companies, right, that they have, like, a huge number of sales teams. But these are all relevant marketing use cases. This other stuff I wanted to give you a visibility into is that knowledge bank, so, like, you can even train the AI with, like some company into information that you wanted to already be aware of, so that you know, like with chat, GPT will get, like, a generic answer, right? Like this model, we train with your information so that value proposition customer pain points are already, like, fed into it. So those are contexts that's already created. We have things like that. It syncs with Salesforce, HubSpot, things like that, so that automatically opportunities are updated.
You can collaborate within the team, and there's like enough access control so you have internal assets which are only viewable by your team. Public like these, like public sites, sales rooms, which are viewable by the customer, all that stuff. So pretty much ready to go. And like we do organize like a lot of in addition to like, General, generally providing these templates, we also have, like, a library that we like to set up for our customers where it's like, oh, everything that's for the sales of like sales team or like sales vertical can be used in this manner, like the one page or the product deck, it's all kind of baked in here, versus, let's say we want to use something, you know, for customer success, or something like that, that's all baked in here. Things like that is like a whole QBR onboarding plan. Things I'm going to pause because I spoke straight for a few minutes and see if there's any questions. Oh,
no, no, that was great. I really appreciate you taking me through it. My first question was, I was just thinking in my head when you were talking about, like, interracial, sorry, interaction with, like, the CRM and how things integrate. Yeah, so I know you, I think you said HubSpot and Salesforce. Are there any other CRM platforms that it would integrate with? And then maybe, if you could detail that out a little bit more?
Yeah, so we are guys, we're a startup, so we work with customer like requirements like, that's basically our whole thing. So the way we're doing it with Salesforce would be the same thing we do with literally any other CRM. So the idea is, you know how, like, you create an asset, and you can now just link it to a certain account or a deal within your CRM. Every CRM operates the same way, right? Salesforce calls them opportunities. HubSpot calls them deals. If you guys use, like, we internally use Zoho. So we, the third thing we're going to build is, like, a Zoho integration and so on so. And then once that integration is built, any asset, whether it's a contract or whatever. Right? Like, you just, like, click a button and it's linked to this opportunity. Then anytime a bio views it, you get the the activity update, right? Anytime they've opened it, or, like, those updates will automatically come into your CRM. So when it like, you know, when the deal closes, you know that. You know, these are the assets that we use and so on. What is the CRM you guys have in mind?
Well, currently, we're using HubSpot, but we're exploring alternatives. Got it? Okay? You know, we are using it right now. I just wanted to see, like, you know, in the future, if we were to transition to a different CRM, how that interact integration would be with crea.
It would be the same way that we would do with HubSpot, basically, like, we have APIs built in a way where it operates exactly the same way. So we just need to, like, plug into the new CRM, like we already know that we need. We are doing Salesforce, HubSpot and Zoho, which are the most popular ones. But then as more come up, that's a requirement you give us, and then we go build that. Yeah,
okay, okay, no, that's, that's great. And so, so, just so I like, this is probably a silly question, but so this would be basically a landing page that is built, and we would be sending them a link to access it. Is that how it would
work? So you can use it, so the way our customers use it is. It's a holistic content platform, so you can use it for one housing all of your internal assets, which is your template gallery, which would not be a public link, it would be an internal link. So let me give you an example of company nurses enablement platform. This is their internal link where they've set up all these templates that they like to that they want their team to use for this particular product, which is like the nurse triage product, okay? And then there's like other use slides and things like that. They also used it. Now, once they created this, I don't know if I have the most recent version of their deck, John, but I know that they they essentially created something like this. Now the for them, when they're sending this to the client, you can either just send this deck, obviously make a duplicate of it, and say, you know, company nurse like this guy is like nurse triage deck for Pfizer, or something like that, and then you get separate tracking for each of those individual times that you send that link. Or you can even create a landing page, which is the use case we discussed. Is a proper landing page. They created this specifically for their TPAs. I think this is all in the medical space, basically, where they swap out the logo of the client, and then the rest of it is the same. Like product is the same link. Case studies the same link. They even had, like, a cool thing where they actually just gave their call transcript, okay, and we turned it into a case study, which was kind of cool. Let me see if I can, yeah, literally just dropped the K the entire transcript. And I was, I was playing with it. I was like, come up with a high level summary. It. Came up with it. There some, some city risk manager and I fed it into the AI and said, come up with three KPIs that were mentioned in this, like one hour transcript. It came up with this. How did they help overcome obstacles? It came up with a summary. Things of that, right? So you have the opportunity to develop multiple types of assets, one of the examples being this sales room, which ties it all together for the buyer. But know that the capability is pretty vast, so depending on your use case, right? These guys use it for the whole breadth of things. We have one user Up Squad. They use it primarily for the digital sales room. They're like, we're pitching this huge client. I want, this long engagement. It's a statewide agency, things of that. So everything is available to you. It's just about creating those templates
and using them. It's very it's a very, very interesting concept. I love the idea of having the templates, having everything there, and it's sort of, you know, like you pick and choose what you want to send to the client. We are a fairly small team. We do a lot in house. So, you know, as far as, like, having all the assets there, like, it's not, it's not like we've got this, like, crazy, huge sales force, and we're trying to consolidate things like that's not really how it would be used for us, yeah. But I do really like the idea of being able to tailor like a package for a prospect or a potential client like that. I see a lot of value in you know, I'm not sure whether we, we would have to test it out to see whether like the landing page versus like sending like, the the deck, the built out deck and assets, but, but it's a very, it's a very interesting concept to me,
awesome, great. Um, what do you guys want to how do you get and like, like, I said, like, we can partner in whatever shape sounds right for you guys, like, a smaller team, much like, much like us and like you, like, yeah. So we largely use it for like, like, I'll send out a pilot plan, and I'm like, Oh my God. Like, I know they're looking at it. So like, my biggest value is that I know the prospect has looked at it. They looked at it seven times. Locations. So
we actually use, we use tools where we track, like when we send email, we've got, like, a lot of very detailed email tracking on our end. So so we are, we do have visibility to that. So, like when we send, you know, a pitch or or documents, our capabilities, deck, or whatever it might be over to a potential client, like we do have, we already have a lot of tracking visibility on that. We're able to see what pages they're on for how long they were on each page. And that information, like Priya and I like laugh all the time, because it is hugely, hugely valuable to us. Like, for us to be able to see, like, oh, okay, they're spending a lot of time on, like, we call it the laundry list, like, the services that we provide, like, they're spending a lot of time on, like, the laundry list slide like that. That's very, very valuable. So I totally agree with you. Like, having, having that functionality is wonderful. As far as like, I'm so sorry, guys. As far as like, if we were to, you know, like, you would have, like, your internal assets and stuff like, how do you protect our documents and and, you know, confidential information and stuff like that, how does, how does that like security work with Korea.
Oh, we're a completely, like, enterprise grade product. So, like, we have complete terms and services. There's also an FAQ page where, like, it's basically housed, and we are getting all our SOC compliance certifications and things of that. So that is all covered, guys and like, know that, you know when we sign, like, any kind of MSA and stuff like, that's all, like, guaranteed, but,
yeah, so I've Terms and Conditions details. A lot of this out as well, and also, like, you know, where's the data being housed, any client information that's come to us? How does the AI handle it? So all this information is provided in our terms and conditions. So you guys can definitely feel free to take a look. Definitely feel free to take a look and in terms of protecting your own content itself, you have full control over it. So for every asset that you create, you essentially can control you know, is it publicly visible that's specifically going to be only going to be the sites that you share with clients. There's specific ones where you can protect it and say, I want to capture email, I want to password protect it. I want to see notifications, and someone sees it. You can make some things private so it's only shared you know within your team. So you can, like, give your team access to like, view it, collaborate among yourselves. It's like a proper like collaboration platform, and then anybody that collaborates with you. You can, like, work together on these decks and things of that. So So you have, like, complete, like, content management capabilities within the platform, right? Okay, very good, amazing. What's a good next step for you guys?
Um, well, I mean, we definitely have to to discuss internally. Like I said, we are considering changing our CRM too. So I think this sort of goes into, like, the bigger discussion. Yeah, Priya, I don't know if you have any thoughts on on specific timing or not. I'm sure you've probably given it some thought. Oh, I don't know if Priya is still there. I know she had some some personal
stuff. He's on mute. She might be on Hey, Priya, you're on mute.
I think she had some personal stuff going on. No. Um, yeah. I mean, why don't, why don't I? I mean, it's Friday today, but we've got, like, our internal syncs every week. So now that I've seen you guys and gotten the intro, you know it's, I'm very glad i i, why don't, why don't we do this? I'll, I'll talk to the team internally next week, and then probably in like, two, maybe three weeks, we'll plan to come back to you with, like, how, how we plan to move forward? If that's okay, yeah,
I think it's a great idea. We can even put something on the calendar for maybe first week of August, so that it's just there and that way. Like, yeah, easy follow up. That's perfect, right? Should we do August 5? Sounds good?
Um, August 5 is a Monday. Mondays are kind of busy for us. If we could do a different day, yeah, Tuesday
or something, totally fine, yeah? And we can do same time, maybe. So it just, yep, amazing. Yeah, that's
wonderful. I'm I'm glad, and I don't know if you have already, like, Have you shared Priya case studies with Priya, or anybody from the team? Like, if there are any, if there's any, like, references of other, like, similar sized, smaller agencies that have used your services, I know I've seen the stuff on the website and stuff, but like, if there are any references or specific case studies that you could share, that would be really wonderful.
Yeah, we can do the bridge it, because they're exactly like you guys. They're a smaller team, and they do consulting services for it, like security. So yeah, we'll share that. Cool, amazing, cool, perfect. Guys. Great meeting you, Jen and say bye to Priya.
I will. I will. It was so nice to meet you guys. thank you so much. Absolutely. Nice. We do take care, bye bye.
