itinai content

←back to Blog

How Intercom Built the Highest-Performing AI Agent on the Market Using Outcome-Based Pricing

The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including:

Archana Agrawal (President of Intercom) joins GTMnow to share how Intercom (founded in 2011) successfully restructured its product, pricing, and go-to-market to become AI-native at a speed and scale most legacy SaaS companies haven’t achieved.

Their agent, Fin, now handles 80%+ of support volume, resolves 1M customer issues per week, and has grown from $1M to $100M+ ARR with a $0.99 outcome-based pricing model backed by up to a $1M performance guarantee if resolution targets aren’t met.

Discussed in this episode

  • Why customer support is fundamentally a 24/7 business
  • How Fin now handles 80%+ of customer queries through automation
  • Why human empathy often breaks down in real-world support workflows
  • How AI makes instant, individualized service possible for the first time
  • Why Intercom put a million-dollar guarantee behind its resolution rate
  • What it takes to confidently price software on outcomes
  • Why the future of support is humans + AI

Episode highlights

00:00 – Why Intercom went all-in on AI
Watch: https://youtu.be/Jt6j5jb31zY?t=0

03:23 – What Fin is and how it changes customer support
Watch: https://youtu.be/Jt6j5jb31zY?t=203

05:27 – How Fin scaled to a 67% resolution-rate
Watch: https://youtu.be/Jt6j5jb31zY?t=327

06:38 – The thinking behind 99¢ outcome-based pricing
Watch: https://youtu.be/Jt6j5jb31zY?t=398

08:54 – Why customers don’t want to pay for activity
Watch: https://youtu.be/Jt6j5jb31zY?t=534

09:10 – How outcome-based pricing aligns incentives
Watch: https://youtu.be/Jt6j5jb31zY?t=550

09:57 – What changed for sales, success, and revenue operations
Watch: https://youtu.be/Jt6j5jb31zY?t=597

15:10 – How Intercom thinks about forward-deployed engineers
Watch: https://youtu.be/Jt6j5jb31zY?t=910

16:22 – Why the future is humans + AI
Watch: https://youtu.be/Jt6j5jb31zY?t=982

18:56 – The real moat: product feedback loops at scale
Watch: https://youtu.be/Jt6j5jb31zY?t=1136

19:32 – Why Intercom put a million-dollar guarantee behind results
Watch: https://youtu.be/Jt6j5jb31zY?t=1172

23:29 – Why enablement is now the GTM bottleneck
Watch: https://youtu.be/Jt6j5jb31zY?t=1409

32:24 – From $1M to nearly $100M: what Fin’s growth reveals
Watch: https://youtu.be/Jt6j5jb31zY?t=1944

38:26 – Hiring in a world with no playbooks
Watch: https://youtu.be/Jt6j5jb31zY?t=2306

42:20 – How Archana learns from podcasts, books, and customers
Watch: https://youtu.be/Jt6j5jb31zY?t=2540

Key takeaways

1. AI-native doesn’t mean “add AI,” it means breaking your old operating model.
Intercom was willing to dismantle the system that made them successful. Seat-based pricing, familiar sales motions, and predictable forecasting all worked for years… until Fin forced a reset. If AI fits neatly into your existing operating model, you’re probably not changing enough.

2. Outcome-based pricing is a good forcing function.
Charging $0.99 per resolved issue exposed every weak link. Sales could no longer optimize for licenses, CS could no longer hide behind usage, revops had to forecast outcomes, etc. And the product had to work, consistently.

3. AI raised the bar for human work.
Intercom didn’t cut headcount and instead transformed roles. Humans moved from execution to system design: training the AI, handling edge cases, and improving performance. The value humans provide shifted from answering questions to building the system that answers them.

4. Forward-deployed engineers are a learning engine.
Intercom avoided heavy customization by design. Every customer interaction fed back into the core product. That discipline is why Fin’s resolution rates climbed from ~27% at launch to 67%+ today. In an AI world, learning speed matters more than customization. The moat is how fast insights move from the field into the product/GTM.

5. Guarantees change buyer psychology more than pricing ever could.
The $0.99 price gets attention, but it’s the $1M performance guarantee that builds trust. By reimbursing customers if resolution targets aren’t met, Intercom created vendor accountability.

Brought to you by:

If you run go-to-market, you already know the problem: your data lives everywhere. Spreadsheets, CRMs, sales calls, ad platforms… yet you’re still guessing what to do next.

HockeyStack is the AI platform for modern GTM teams. It unifies all your sales and marketing data into a single system of action. Built-in AI agents help teams prospect the right accounts, improve conversions, close and expand deals, and scale what works. That’s why teams like RingCentral, Outreach, ActiveCampaign, and Fortune 100 companies rely on HockeyStack to eliminate wasted spend, take better decisions, and make space to think.

Learn more at hockeystack.com

We’ve got an incredible deal exclusive to GTMnow listeners.

It’s for Granola, the AI notepad for people in back-to-back meetings.

We’re Granola users at GTMfund, and it has changed the way we work.

Granola takes meeting notes for you without any intrusive bots joining your calls.

During or after the call, you can chat with your notes.

Ask Granola to pull out action items, help you negotiate, write a follow-up email … or even coach you using Recipes, which are pre-made prompts.

It’s actually the same technology we use to create the notes for this very podcast. Once you try it on a first meeting, it’s hard to go without.

Head to granola.ai/gtmfund and get three months free with the code GTMFUND.

Follow Archana Agrawal

Follow Sophie Buonassisi (Host)

Where to Find GTMnow

GTM 178 Episode Transcript

00:00

Sophie Buonassisi: Intercom has been around since 2011. It’s like a large scale company. Yet despite that scale, you were one of the first big companies to go all in on.

00:07

Archana Agrawal: I thin is our I thin manages over 80% automation rate for all the customer queries that are coming to us.

00:15

Sophie Buonassisi: Archana Agarwal is president, Entercom leading go to market strategy and the sales marketing success and support teams.

00:22

Archana Agrawal: Customer service is actually a 24 over seven business if you want instant answers, accurate answers. But what really happens in the field is you find customers are stuck in phone trees or okay, we’ll get back to you in 24 hours. Instant service is very hard, and being able to scale that level of individual service is now truly possible.

00:44

Archana Agrawal: For the first.

00:45

Sophie Buonassisi: Time, you are covering at least a million inquiries.

00:49

Archana Agrawal: Every week, which.

00:50

Sophie Buonassisi: Equates to about 6500 humans.

00:53

Archana Agrawal: Yes. I mean, our customer service agents, the human agents are now AI operators.

00:59

Sophie Buonassisi: One of the most bold pricing decisions that I’ve seen is your 99% pricing.

01:03

Archana Agrawal: Customers didn’t want to pay for activity, and so we get paid when our customers have that positive outcome. I believe.

01:10

Sophie Buonassisi: You have an actual guarantee.

01:11

Archana Agrawal: If we don’t meet the resolution rate, there’s the million dollar guarantee out there.

01:16

Unknown: Oh!

01:24

Unknown: Let’s go.

01:26

Sophie Buonassisi: Archana, welcome to GTM now.

01:28

Archana Agrawal: So glad to be here. Thank you for having me here.

01:31

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah.

01:31

Sophie Buonassisi: You bet. Thank you for having me here in the intercom

01:34

Sophie Buonassisi: office in San Francisco to appreciate it. And what a beautiful office.

01:37

Archana Agrawal: Oh. Thank you. Yes, it’s

01:38

Archana Agrawal: a lovely location.

01:39

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. It’s wonderful.

01:40

Sophie Buonassisi: And really excited to be here, but also to sit down and just pick your brain on everything. AI and intercom transformation. A lot of other topics too, but that’s a real big notable one. So let’s start there.

01:53

Sophie Buonassisi: intercom has been around since 2011.

01:56

Sophie Buonassisi: consistently shows up in the cloud.

01:58

Sophie Buonassisi: 100 is like a large scale company. Yet despite that scale, you were one of the first big companies to go all in on AI. What was that decision making process like to really go AI forward?

02:11

Archana Agrawal: Yeah.

02:11

Archana Agrawal: intercom was founded on this mission of making internet business personal. Like the founders really care about impeccable, almost perfect customer service, which is very hard. Like that is very, very hard to provide.

02:29

Archana Agrawal: And

02:29

Archana Agrawal: especially with the old technology, while intercom had invested in an AI team and had a lot of AI going on,

02:35

Archana Agrawal: prior to that as well. It was really one sort of ChatGPT came through and the neural alarms came through that they were able to really see the transformative power that AI agents would be able to have.

02:48

Archana Agrawal: And that was when fin was, was born. To, to fortunately, being able to see us, we’ve been able to see how it’s been able to change so many customers, businesses and the evolution of the AI agent itself across all different channels and all different models is been, incredible. So that’s been the leads the company has read.

03:11

Sophie Buonassisi: Incredible. Yeah. I mean, it’s certainly stand out as one of the companies that have done it in the most bold forward way. And fin, maybe you can just give a little bit of a description for fin. Anyone unfamiliar?

03:22

Archana Agrawal: Yeah.

03:23

Archana Agrawal: Fin is our AI agent that manages, all of the customer service inquiries that come. So previously, you know, you’d have humans managed through informational customer queries or take actions on behalf of the customers. But now with AI, you can actually have an AI agent do a lot of that. In fact, here at intercom itself. Fin manages over 80% automation rate for all the customer queries that are coming to to us, either providing customers the information they need or taking actions on behalf of what otherwise a human would have been able to do.

04:01

Archana Agrawal: And Fin works on intercom, of course, the intercom helpdesk, but it also works on other, help desks. And so you can have fin working on your Zendesk platform or service cloud. And so it’s really has has had a big impact in how people actually engage with their customers.

04:21

Archana Agrawal: Now customer service is actually a 24 over seven business

04:27

Archana Agrawal: in any language.

04:28

Archana Agrawal: You want instant answers, accurate answers. And that’s then the change that fin has driven.

04:36

Sophie Buonassisi: I used to personally always think that the most human and helpful way was actually having a human interaction. And I have since,

04:42

Sophie Buonassisi: changed my mind on that because it is truly incredible to have that level of support available 24 over seven. And I think I saw tweet actually recently that you’re covering, I believe it was a million inquiries every week, which equates to about 6500 humans that fin is replacing.

04:59

Archana Agrawal: And you know, I think the thing is it’s easy to, sort of really feel the empathy a human can can provide. But what really happens in the field is you find that customers are stuck in phone trees or, okay, we’ll get back to you in 24 hours, 48 hours. Instant service is very hard, and being able to scale that level of service, individual service is now truly possible for the first time.

05:27

Archana Agrawal: So when fin released actually, all the way in 2023, it’s actually released with resolution rates in the mid 20s, which means that on average, you know, 27% of your customer inquiries were getting resolved by the AI agent.

05:46

Archana Agrawal: Fast forward to today. The average resolution rate is over 67%. Why? So that is product improvement that, 100% of our 7000 plus customers are getting advantages of this product improvement without any sort of static, custom software that’s stuck in their, you know, instance. They’re all taking this leap forward with the product

06:15

Archana Agrawal: I mean these are so incredibly programable, right. Like for you to towards what your brand wants your voice, your policy, your tone, everything. And so you can actually truly represent your brand with your customers and provide the kind of experience you wanna tailor make for your customers, which, of course, you can imagine has has big implications for any business.

06:36

Sophie Buonassisi: Massive. Yeah, definitely.

06:38

Sophie Buonassisi: And that brings me to, I mean, one of the most bold pricing decisions that I’ve seen personally. And I think according to Acts and Twitter has also seen but is your 99 cent pricing. And that was rolled out initially, I believe, in 2023 and now is quite and incorporated within two and 3 in 2025. But pricing is super important because, I mean, this is GTM now, but it is one of the most pivotal parts of go to market.

07:03

Sophie Buonassisi: It used to be from the venture lens, what we’d see is you can afford to get your pricing wrong or tweak it now. It’s imperative that you’re getting it right, if you will, off the gate, or if your you’re embedding it into your go to market in the way that it is, your moment is your strategic advantage. And you did just that.

07:22

Sophie Buonassisi: So I would love to hear more about your 99% pricing and outcome based pricing. Yeah.

07:27

Archana Agrawal: If I could go back to maybe a story in that case because, that was actually what caught my eye about intercom. Yeah.

07:35

Archana Agrawal: Is when they launched fin and outcomes based pricing, it was incredibly intuitive. First of all, a product that’s so simple to try could actually, you know,

07:47

Archana Agrawal: start a trial yourself, check it out, how it works, and then know that every time it answered a customer query,

07:53

Archana Agrawal: it was it was really, truly an outcome.

07:55

Archana Agrawal: It was based on the value that the customer was was getting. And it’s easy to think, you know, you launch a product, it’s an eye forward product. It’s really good. But really to then take it to market is a go to market model, complete operating model shift. And when your prior has been selling seat based software, right.

08:22

Archana Agrawal: To add to that truly outcomes based software, that means you have to change everything ranging from like sales to support success, professional services, metering, billing, pricing. Right. All of that, changes alongside with it. So yeah, intercom was one of the first to actually launch. But the AI agent. But to turnaround deep research with customers trying to understand what they wanted.

08:54

Archana Agrawal: And this won’t be a surprise. Customers didn’t want to pay for activity.

08:58

Archana Agrawal: Yeah, right. Like,

09:00

Archana Agrawal: take a long time to answer a query. That’s not what they’re looking for. The number of messages or the number of tokens were just in the end. Right.

09:07

Sophie Buonassisi: So

09:07

Sophie Buonassisi: they want less messages.

09:08

Archana Agrawal: Exactly. They want they want

09:10

Archana Agrawal: the vendor to be equally incentivized on the outcomes that they care about. And so we get paid when our customers have that positive outcome and the customer support tickets are absolutely, completely resolved. And so it’s it’s a an amazing way to actually converge both sort of sides of the incentives to make sure that we’re delivering value to the customer at every point.

09:35

Sophie Buonassisi: Incredibly

09:35

Sophie Buonassisi: customer forward. And I think it goes without saying from an outcome based pricing, but the customer actually selects when they’re done with that inquiry, and that’s what triggers the pricing. And I think that’s just putting the customer truly at the heart. But what did that do for your go to market? Introducing the 99 cent pricing. Like what has that done now for our growth overall.

09:56

Archana Agrawal: Yeah. And so

09:57

Archana Agrawal: the entire operating model around this has to change, right. Because first of all, you know, your sales team is not trying to figure out, hey, how many seats do you want to sell? What kind of subscription length do you want? Instead? They’re actually trying to figure out what, what kind of volume do you get?

10:17

Archana Agrawal: Yeah. How much are you open to automating? What is your transition plan to automate it, like to actually figure out their selling yield outcomes?

10:26

Archana Agrawal: And then the success teams are actually,

10:29

Archana Agrawal: helping realize those outcomes.

10:31

Archana Agrawal: in fact, I like to think about it like, almost a little bit like the

10:35

Archana Agrawal: success team is helping with performance management of the AI agent more than you know, previously.

10:40

Archana Agrawal: You think about logins and activity and things like that, but now they’re actually tuning in the fund, managing your agent for you, the sort of billing and metering so that the customer has complete visibility around what their using becomes very important. We go even further, frankly, because we know every customer has a different way in which they would actually want to adopt AI.

11:11

Archana Agrawal: Some folks know that they’re going to try to transform their customer service organization. Others want to step into it.

11:19

Sophie Buonassisi: Right.

11:20

Archana Agrawal: Right. And so we actually have to as you go models as well. Try it, figure out how you’ll evolve it with you. How will onboard things, figure out how much you want to use. And then when you’re ready, we’ll actually talk to you about the longer term contract and help you get onboard with that trade. And so we really have massive amounts of pricing flexibility all the way from self-serve to enterprise contracts, pay as you go models where you have $0.99 per resolution or longer term contracts that you have with us.

11:55

Archana Agrawal: And so it was the entire tuning of that system across all the the different functions of go to market to get us to that place.

12:03

Sophie Buonassisi: And I’m sure it did have a ton of fine tuning under it across like you mentioned sales. Yes. Every team essentially changes how they operate. How did you operationalize that change as you moved forward with this outcome based pricing model?

12:15

Archana Agrawal: Yes.

12:16

Archana Agrawal: There’s there’s so much that happened sort of both on the product and the go to market side to actually realize this in the field. Right. So I’ll start with the idea that the intercom product is I like to think about it as you can try it anywhere you want. You can buy it, you can configure it, you can deploy it, you can manage it.

12:39

Archana Agrawal: You can do all of that all by yourself. And there’s a huge product investment. Then that goes, you know, and the fact of being able to truly serve enterprise features and, and to price change management, but also having the consumer create experiences. If you will, to allow someone to go through that journey themselves. And so that that describes a little bit of our self-service ability and the self-serve business, the PLC oriented business that we have.

13:08

Archana Agrawal: And there too, you can imagine the metering and the billing and the transparency to help the customer actually get on board and start using fin

13:16

Archana Agrawal: becomes very important

13:18

Archana Agrawal: on the same side, as customers get into larger footprints and want to set contracts. You can imagine we have a helpdesk that they may be purchasing, which is sort of seat based.

13:30

Sophie Buonassisi: Right?

13:30

Archana Agrawal: And

13:31

Archana Agrawal: then they have the outcomes based fin AI agent that they’re also purchasing. And so this is a new motion for the sales team. Yeah. This was a new motion for our entire revenue operations and our financial planning. How do you actually forecast people’s AI resolutions and outcomes. How do you incentivize your sales team to actually sell that new part of that business and work with our customers in a consultative way to make sure they are able to onboard into this new AI

14:05

Archana Agrawal: agent world?

14:06

Archana Agrawal: How do you then have success teams step in to fine tune the performance and help customers realize the outcomes that they have on that front. And so each of these teams themselves took on new goals, new skills, new upskilling as well. It was a it’s a very consultative model in that regard. But once the customer has been set up, right, even the product pulls its weight in terms of being very, very self manageable so that the customers can tweak and configure our businesses are changing rapidly.

14:44

Archana Agrawal: I run our support team as well. And so I can tell you that just as the business evolves, the guidance I need to give our reagent also evolves. And so how do you get on this continuous improvement cycle? That’s something success needs to be able to help you with and through this entire process. If you want to help a partnership, whether it’s through our forward deploy engineers or whether it is through our professional services, how can we be there to help the customer get started off on the right way to be able to evolve from there?

15:18

Sophie Buonassisi: A quick pause for company where a huge fan of yours. If you run go to market, you already know the problem. Your data lives everywhere. Spreadsheets, CRM, sales, calls, ad platforms. Yet you’re still guessing what to do next. Hockey stack is the AI platform for modern go to market teams, unifies all your sales and marketing data into a single system of action.

15:37

Sophie Buonassisi: Built in AI agents help teams prospect the right accounts, improve conversions, close and expand deals, and scale what works. That’s why teams like RingCentral outreach, Active Campaign, and fortune 100 companies rely on hockey stack to eliminate wasted spend, take better decisions and make space to think. Learn more at Hockey stack.com. That’s hockey y

15:59

Sophie Buonassisi: esta SI.com.

16:01

Sophie Buonassisi: There’s a lot to unpack there, but I’ll start with the high level, which is you cutie’s dual emotions. Like you said, you’ve got sea based pricing, you’ve caught the eye outcome based pricing, and you’ve even got a hybrid, you know, is more of the trial. Is that the future for other companies, for other companies that are looking to similarly transform and go a lot more eye forward?

16:22

Archana Agrawal: would definitely depend on the sort of the business model and the kind of functions that the AI agent or your AI software is providing at least some customer service. We believe that the future is humans. Plus I for a very, very long time. When you think about even how intercom, customer support has evolved, you’ll see that it’s it is a it is one of our functions where we haven’t actually seen headcount growth, because the AI agent is taking up a lot of the volume and the demand increases that we’ve seen over the years.

16:55

Archana Agrawal: However, the skills within the team are transforming because the team members are no longer answering simple questions that they used to or taking actions on behalf of the customers. By the time something reaches your AI agent, it is an extremely high order. It. It’s a very complex situation that you might have. A customer might need to navigate that thing actually reaching out to a human for.

17:21

Archana Agrawal: Right. So that’s sort of like the skills change. Our customer service agents, the human agents are now AI operators. They manage the AI on behalf of the company. And so, the the transformation has been both a human and AI oriented transformation for us. That is a long term sort of model that we will have. And so we expect even our customers will always have that human component that’s guiding and helping, playing a slightly different role than they did previously, but is guiding and helping, the customers in the same way now?

18:02

Archana Agrawal: By all means, one can also just purchase and use an AI agent,

18:06

Archana Agrawal: but it’s got to have some of the human help desk at the background that actually helps them. When the AI agent has to hand over something to a human to help to the process.

18:16

Archana Agrawal: thing about this transformation, you know, when you see, when used to think about customer experience, you thought about the UI of the product, the experience of the product.

18:25

Archana Agrawal: But now I think customer experience actually extends into the customer’s org themselves, because the humans are changing the roles that they use to do. And so the practice and the transformation that customers need to adopt, it’s we’re actually developing a blueprint for that so that people know actually how to launch something like how to evaluate an AI agent, how to launch it, and how to scale it.

18:56

Archana Agrawal: All of that is honestly just the, the good fortune of having 7000 customers deploying it, that we’re able to also take a lot of those best practices and feed back into into the system, both from a product perspective but also from a practice perspective.

19:13

Sophie Buonassisi: And is interesting because you mentioned you’re now at around 67 I believe percent resolution rate on

19:21

Sophie Buonassisi: average.

19:21

Archana Agrawal: Yes. Many customers see much more than that. But yeah across the yeah.

19:25

Sophie Buonassisi: Across them all. And

19:26

Sophie Buonassisi: I believe you have an actual guarantee. Yeah. Not to which is very bold.

19:31

Archana Agrawal: Yes.

19:32

Sophie Buonassisi: How did you decide to put a guarantee on your resolution rate. You’ll actually reimburse somebody if you don’t have it. Yeah. And then how do you model that into your financial side.

19:41

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah.

19:43

Archana Agrawal: It comes with the confidence from having an amazing product. I have to say, you know, when you get into head to heads or a competitive situations and you’re seeing that the product is, able to win out, it comes from the self manageability of the product that it’s much easier to configure and get going. It’s comes from the simple things that I mentioned about not having custom software in different parts of different customer’s workspaces, but actually allowing all boats to lift with the product improvements that we drive to be able to say Triton, we know, we know you love it.

20:17

Archana Agrawal: If you don’t, there’s a money back guarantee. If we don’t meet for large customers, high volume customers, if we don’t meet the resolution rate, there’s the million dollar guarantee out there. And it really comes from being able from having that confidence in a product that has happened every step of the way, objectively shown to deliver the goods for the customers.

20:39

Sophie Buonassisi: Do

20:39

Sophie Buonassisi: you think we’ll see more software companies putting guarantees on them and following suit?

20:45

Archana Agrawal: I

20:45

Archana Agrawal: certainly hope so. I think it, it, increases vendor confidence and trust. I would I would imagine it it’s definitely a big sign of partnership. I mean, the outcomes based pricing definitely also tries just to signal exactly that. It’s it’s a big change in the entire software landscape and how we run businesses. I personally find myself very fortunate to be a leader.

21:09

Archana Agrawal: At the same time, you know, in my career where it’s just so much changing across all functions, across all, industries. Right. And, that that signal of confidence, you know, that that customers look for, I think it’s an important one. There are the signals people will look for. They’ll look for, you know, pace of innovation.

21:32

Archana Agrawal: I think that’s an extremely important one today. A sense of partnership. I the entire idea of consultative, selling and consultative support is very, very important to us just for the same reason we’ve we’ve been through that transformation ourselves. And so we know it’s, it’s one that’s very methodical and one that you need to plan for. And impacts, your end user experience, really which, which is, which will a companies really put that at the forefront and their, priorities?

22:04

Sophie Buonassisi: What advice would you give to a company that wants to make this transition maybe at an earlier stage, but they want to be putting more of their product at the forefront in a way of the pricing.

22:15

Sophie Buonassisi: any advice there for someone maybe ten steps behind?

22:19

Archana Agrawal: Yeah.

22:19

Archana Agrawal: It it would it would depend on the business model. So for as an example here, you know, when you have and there aren’t very many AI agents, on, on the application side that are self serviceable at a team level. Right, like customer service, an entire teams got to use the same software and you’ve got to program it that way.

22:41

Archana Agrawal: And so but when you’re trying to do something like that, then really focusing on both discoverability and activation, but then the product becomes important, giving customers the appropriate nudges, education, allowing them to be able to reach out and get, the support they need in order to activate and deploy. All of that becomes, very important. Not the same thing.

23:08

Archana Agrawal: You flip it. If you’re doing mostly predominantly enterprise oriented businesses, then a lot of what we said regarding the sales partnership and the support model, as well as forward deploy engineers, professional services partners, all of that comes into play to help a customer get set up correctly.

23:26

Sophie Buonassisi: It

23:26

Sophie Buonassisi: sounds like holistic enablement from every touchpoint.

23:29

Archana Agrawal: Yeah. And holistic enablement. It’s, it’s also another remarkable, change that we’ve seen, right? Because, that there used to be an era, I guess, where you would have a couple big launches in a year and you’d have your teams enabled for that. It’s completely different right now. There’s a product velocity like no other time that we’ve seen.

23:53

Archana Agrawal: Products are constantly evolving. So how do you keep an entire Salesforce, an entire success team abreast of all of those, not those bits of knowledge, but also at the forefront of being able to actually help the customer? And in a very hands on way get set up. And so it’s also, it’s a continuous enablement that has been, a big part of this journey.

24:18

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah.

24:19

Sophie Buonassisi: It sounds like that’s really what spins the go to market engine, because as product velocity speeds up. Yes. No longer is at the bottleneck. It used to be that product was the bottom. And that’s now your go to market is the bottleneck. How quickly can you adapt sales customer success, everything around your product. It sounds like enablement.

24:35

Sophie Buonassisi: What you really put in place from every angle.

24:37

Archana Agrawal: Exactly. And

24:38

Archana Agrawal: I and when I think about this, really is the dual emotion which is, self-serve and enterprise being able to serve customers of different who have different speeds of adoption in, of themselves. Then I think about that enablement got to come in all possible different channels for the customers, right? It’s not always a one on one conversation with the customer that’s going to help the customer get to success.

25:05

Archana Agrawal: It’s all the digital education and the nudges and the the blueprints, as I mentioned, that actually tell a customer how do they go ahead to do it. You can imagine all of that quickly evolving for new channels or for new types of customer service that are being provided.

25:23

Sophie Buonassisi: A quick pause. I’ve got an incredible deal exclusive to GTM now listeners. It’s for granola. The I know for people and back to back meetings were granola users at GTM fund. And trust me when I say it has changed the way that we work. Granola takes meeting notes for you without any intrusive thoughts. Joining your calls during or after the call.

25:43

Sophie Buonassisi: You can chat with your notes, ask granola to pull up action items, help you negotiate, write a follow up email, or even coach you using recipes which are pre-made prompts. It’s actually the same technology we used to create the notes for this very podcast. Once you try it on the first meeting, it’s hard to go without it. Head to granola.

26:01

Sophie Buonassisi: I forget GTM fund to get three months free with the code GTM on all capitals, and that will be in the show. Notes. Back to the episode.

26:10

Sophie Buonassisi: we had Christine when he was the for sales higher up snowflake, he went on through for sales higher all the way through to, to IPO. And he mentioned that from the very beginning their compensation for sales was tied to usage because they were a usage based product. I’m curious for yourself as you made this transition, what area of your go to market was the most challenging to adapt?

26:34

Archana Agrawal: I think the, the, the thing that was most challenging is that they all had to adapt at the same time.

26:39

Archana Agrawal: Know that was that because there was you

26:42

Archana Agrawal: couldn’t leave one portion behind and evolve the other. Right. Like our org structures themselves changed in order to accommodate all of this, like our support team structure changed, a number of different things.

26:57

Archana Agrawal: But I do believe that the, a big benefit that we got this, like, instead of just launching a product, I think one of the biggest changes we made than in the operating model is sort of the revenue operations that took place alongside with sales incentives, sales enablement that became like critical because I completely agree with Chris on this.

27:21

Archana Agrawal: It’s like you have to have the teams working with customers usage and outcomes, not have just use it, but outcomes. Yeah, this is what they are engineering this for right now. And so how do you know that every sales rep, every customer success rep is actually laser focused on customer outcomes. And the growth of those outcomes in the customers might start with one part of their business or one channel email, phone chat like, and then they need to grow and evolve the the channels that they’re using.

27:54

Archana Agrawal: How, how and different customers, different industries e-commerce different from B2B, different from financial services. How do you enable the teams to give them sort of the right formula and the support that they need in order to be able to increase their automation rate meaningfully through their journey? And how do you create I mentioned a little bit about the billing and the metering, but let customers get the confidence in what they’re buying and how much they’re buying.

28:22

Archana Agrawal: Make it easy for them to get into overages and then and then build in contracts when they need to. I mentioned our pay as you go model as well. So building the flexibility for the customer, but still hold the outcomes as the most important thing for the company and for all my teams. And that was sort of the, I think one of the critical things that we had to do in order to seed the ramp with.

28:51

Sophie Buonassisi: been a busy two years for you.

28:52

Archana Agrawal: It certainly has.

28:53

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, yeah.

28:54

Archana Agrawal: And an exciting one.

28:56

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Definitely.

28:58

Sophie Buonassisi: And you I mean, made the transition. You’ve got the outcome based pricing in, in motion. You’ve got the seat based model. Also what does the future look like. Do you see the future as dual or do you anticipate everything shifting to usage outcomes. For example?

29:12

Archana Agrawal: We do see the futures deal at this point in time. We see we see the role humans play in the process changing and therefore their software evolving alongside with that. But but they are still very, very much part of the process. And the two things obviously, go hand in hand. Right. Depending on how much you automate and use your agent, your human capacity needs change accordingly depending on your business policies, so on and so forth.

29:46

Archana Agrawal: One of the things that we find, that’s quite, compelling is as people have gotten more sort of comfortable with the idea of this transformation, you see companies move from, maybe starting off where I was, answering questions for the end user. Yeah, to where it’s actually taking actions. Oh, you want to refund, you need a new card.

30:12

Archana Agrawal: You’d want to make an exchange. You want to change your subscription. You have a pricing question. Whatever it is, it’s actually taking taking a lot of actions on behalf of the customer service team. So the humans are still very much part of the equation, but their role keeps evolving along the time. And and we see that to be a constant, at least for, for a long time to come.

30:36

Sophie Buonassisi: interesting because earlier you touched on this too of how your headcount has stayed the same for forces, but their roles have evolved. So it, it almost rewrites the way you, you learn and grow in a company too.

30:47

Archana Agrawal: Absolutely, absolutely. I

30:49

Archana Agrawal: I mean, this has been maybe one of the, you know, when, when, when sort of the advent of all software going to SAS and cloud based, I think was a big move in the customer success space about how do you actually make a customer successful and how do you think about it? Right?

31:08

Archana Agrawal: I think this is yet another another wave where we’ve had almost every team needing to change or upskill or be involved in a different job than they had been previously. And we’ve seen customers go through different parts of this journey themselves. Right. Like, you have some customers that just want to try and figure out and play a little bit with the AI agent and try to figure out how do they build their part.

31:40

Archana Agrawal: And you’ve seen large scale transformations as well. And so being able to support all of that from a good market perspective definitely required. I’d say people taking on different roles and it’s it’s it’s actually been a fun journey for the entire employee base. It’s it because it’s a learning journey. Right? And that’s always the best that there is.

32:06

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah,

32:07

Sophie Buonassisi: exactly. And everyone’s learning together too, which is a unique time. Yeah.

32:10

Sophie Buonassisi: For everybody.

32:11

Archana Agrawal: Yeah. Learning, sharing knowledge. And we learn even with the way all of our customers are rapidly adopting AI, that there’s so many lessons that for us to define.

32:24

Sophie Buonassisi: Well, we talked about how you made the transition and how you watched Fin in 2023. Now, what has that done from a revenue perspective? I believe in your first year or Fin, you went from 1 to 12 million immediately, but you have you have continued to grow from there. So I’d love to hear more about the numbers behind this.

32:43

Archana Agrawal: Yeah.

32:43

Archana Agrawal: And so fin has had incredible amount of growth. We should we’re on track in a few months to be able to, cross 100 million in revenue on fin itself and growing the the growth rate is accelerating. It’s been and it’s been across companies of all sizes and shapes. I’d say we have with 7000 customers, you can imagine that there’s, smaller footprint in the self-serve, but also extremely large customers that we have, using our product.

33:17

Sophie Buonassisi: Brilliant. Well, can we just see the continued growth? And prior to intercom, you know, you spent over seven years at that last year, and you spent almost four years growing your table, serving as CMO. What have been some of the greatest lessons throughout your career?

33:31

Sophie Buonassisi: The common threads that you pulled through from those experiences here to today?

33:35

Archana Agrawal: Yeah. So

33:37

Archana Agrawal: I’ve been very fortunate because both of those are incredible companies, first and foremost, and they are such amazing places to both learn and grow. So, one common thread, if you’d ask me to, it would be the idea that you can actually build enterprise grade software and, provide that level of service to your customers while still deeply caring about consumer grade experiences and building with the product.

34:07

Archana Agrawal: First mentality. So it goes without saying. Atlassian is like the purest form of that self-serve. The buyer journey totally maps your product to usage. You know, very simple, transparent pricing, no discounts, no negotiations, just you try and buy. And that’s how the customer. And so there was an incredible focus on the buyer journey and that ease of use that was that was amazing.

34:34

Archana Agrawal: Airtable on the other hand, went from massive plg success. To be able to harness that and take that to the enterprise. And it was like building an enterprise machine over a PLC, business. Same thing again, right? When you think about change management and governance and starting to invest in all of that, while ensuring that what feeds that business and sort of the discoverability and actually activation that become very important in the Plg journey still stayed front and center as important, to the company.

35:07

Archana Agrawal: And now I’d say that intercom, with Finn has let me take that to a completely different level, because one of the things we mentioned is this interplay between product and go to market, like moving hand in hand. In order to do that, the product taking the weight that it needs to in order to help grow in the customer’s, sort of workspace.

35:32

Archana Agrawal: Right? It’s the self manageability portion of it and the ability for customers to actually take control of their own destiny with the AI agent, and then the go to market motions that actually can support that with the kind of partnership that we provide. So I think that that that’s been definitely the common thread in all of them, which is you can aim for that enterprise footprint and you can help provide that level of service.

36:02

Archana Agrawal: But the ease of use and the activation energy that you put in a product that everybody can adopt, Atlassian used to say, you know, we’re not for the, fortune 5000 for the fortune 500,000. And that always, resonated, you know, the companies with that aspiration of we’ll serve everybody and we’ll we’ll make this the next standard has been, has been truly amazing.

36:33

Sophie Buonassisi: That’s incredible. Where there’s

36:35

Sophie Buonassisi: some kind of pivotal stories along the way from Atlassian or Airtable that looking back now, your career were formative ones for you.

36:44

Archana Agrawal: Yeah I mean there’ll be so many. But I think the sort of focus, and non-negotiable focus, like a company like Atlassian had on user journeys don’t do not but sort of humans where you can actually build something that the, the entire customer base can take advantage of. And so making it as easy to use, looking at every touchpoint that we thought almost added friction for a customer and helping remove those touchpoints, really in the go to market motion itself.

37:21

Archana Agrawal: How to think about, digital education. Those those become became extremely important. And in Airtable, how do you actually take the community and the virality that you get in appeal to emotion and take that to the enterprise and help spread the product within the enterprise? And so how do you think about land and expand between different functions in the enterprise?

37:48

Archana Agrawal: Based on all of the rich learning around discoverability and virality that you’ve had from the customer base, it’s been another sort of learning to take and to think about, once again, education and usage and adoption. Once you get, a customer to start using the product, which has been, an incredibly, useful way to think about expansion, honestly, because, you know, you know, making it most easy for the customer and giving them all the tools that they need in order to be able to expand.

38:25

Sophie Buonassisi: Incredible.

38:26

Sophie Buonassisi: And you had to hire a lot of incredible people at both companies and now at intercom, too. And like we’ve talked about the skill set employee matters so much because suddenly everybody’s being asked to do things they’ve never done before in a new environment, learn new skills, take new roles. What are some of your key key focus points when you’re making a hire and recommendations for anyone who is looking to hire people that can make that AI transformation journey?

38:54

Archana Agrawal: Yeah.

38:55

Archana Agrawal: One of the things, I mean, we all look for, you know, folks that get that, that understand the lay of the land can get the job done. But we’ve not I’ve not gone back ever and thought about, you know, I need people from a certain company or who’ve done something in certain specific way because there are no playbooks today.

39:15

Archana Agrawal: You want folks that can sort of discover it builders, but by heart, and there are ups and downs on the journey. So I think the grit and the determination to to take it forward and say, you’re looking for folks who can think first principles, think out of the box. You know, they aren’t extremely reliant on an old playbook.

39:36

Archana Agrawal: Oh, this is how it used to work. Because the rules of the game have changed. And so, you know, being able to think on their feet and be able to rediscover, like the new rules would be an important component of that. So if I had to say it’s that grit and resilience that, that we look for. Yeah. And I’ve, I’ve, we all sort of like, at the leadership level, you end up, almost always like leading so many different functions that it’s not.

40:10

Archana Agrawal: I actually don’t find myself to be an absolute A-plus expert in every single thing. But when you do hire the absolute A-plus expert, to be part of your team, then you know that together you can actually make it comprehensively amazing team. And that’s always been the focus, which is hire people that are really, really strong at what they do.

40:32

Archana Agrawal: Think through first principles. And when you bring that group together, you get to see sort of the explosive results, that we get to see with it.

40:42

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah.

40:42

Sophie Buonassisi: I find the magic in a bottle happens. Yes. Are there any very specific questions or ways that you gauge the grit for people? Like. I’ll give you an example, Christine or quarter, where she was a ninth employee at stripe and she’s now the CEO at linear. She looks for excellence in any domain. It could be in Lego construction.

41:02

Sophie Buonassisi: It could be literally anything that like that, very specific excellence in something, because the premise and hypothesis is that it transfers or it’s transferable.

41:11

Archana Agrawal: Yeah.

41:12

Archana Agrawal: I think quite similarly, I think I, I look for excellence. But I also look for a learner’s mentality. Right. Yeah, a little bit of, dissatisfaction maybe with statistical.

41:27

Archana Agrawal: Okay. And so that’s what I’m kind of looking

41:30

Archana Agrawal: for in stories when, when, when people share those stories is, you know, it’s it’s perfectly amazing to get to come across people that have just excelled.

41:42

Archana Agrawal: But in the in their journey, when they can pick up the nuggets of the learnings, the mistakes, or how they made their own pivots, that becomes important, in that. And so looking for, learners and people that, that are always a little bit ready to agitate, they start the skill and, and do better and do better.

42:04

Archana Agrawal: And that’s what, yeah,

42:06

Archana Agrawal: I love it for.

42:07

Sophie Buonassisi: I love it. So you’re looking for an aptitude for learning. What about yourself? From a learning side, how do you absorb information, especially right now, maybe of AI, but how do you learn? Do you go to podcast books, like what’s your go to.

42:20

Archana Agrawal: Podcasts? Definitely. Because you get, sort of, practitioner learning and learning in real time is. Yeah, if you will. While I shared the story with you at the very same time, I know if we were to speak next year, there would be some evolutions, more learnings, more things for. And so you get to see sort of that that in podcasts that out there.

42:43

Archana Agrawal: Of course. There are of course time tested books that you can always go back to. And, I probably have a couple of those on my shelf as well. I learned a lot from my team and I learned a lot from our customers. We have so many different sort of the slack channels and ways to gain insights from what’s happening on the field with our customers, in our conversations.

43:08

Archana Agrawal: And it’s not just about learning about how they think about customer service or learning how they think about sin or the adoption. It’s how they’re thinking about AI in their companies and how they’re thinking about transformation. And so it’s, I mean, day to day job, as I said, maybe I’ll add that to the reason why I feel we’re so fortunate that this standard to be in these positions, because it’s just, you get to learn alongside with everybody as they’re making this transformation.

43:40

Sophie Buonassisi: Super cool. I feel like you’re you’re actually the perfect example of that because you saw the plg velocity from revelation, and then you learned and transitioned to the plg to enterprise. And now you’re owning the transition to AI. So you really live through three different huge motion adjustments and led through these times.

43:56

Archana Agrawal: Yes,

43:57

Archana Agrawal: yes. That, that that is true. It’s been it’s been and with incredible teams that’s been the amazing part of doing that journey with incredible teams and incredible companies. And when you say that, though, I also do realize, this is my little go to market. Hack. Yeah. If you will just follow an amazing product,

44:18

Archana Agrawal: Parkhill, you follow an amazing product and

44:23

Archana Agrawal: and let it carry its weight and then, you know, it’s my job is impossible without that one incredible ingredient.

44:32

Archana Agrawal: And with that one ingredient, it’s just phenomenal.

44:36

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. It’s true. I think you can hear that mirrored from a lot of people who have, you know, been behind successful products and said it’s a lot easier to sell and not to discount their success by any means, but it’s just that you get that. You get that momentum. Yes, yes. With it. Yeah.

44:51

Archana Agrawal: That’s great.

44:51

Archana Agrawal: Yeah. And and I mean that’s something that you also want your teams to recognize and and leverage to really to the best that they can. So that that’s an important component of it for sure.

45:03

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah.

45:04

Sophie Buonassisi: Great advice. And what about if we zoom out a little bit life more holistically. Do you have any favorite quotes or models that you would buy.

45:11

Archana Agrawal: And not quote? Okay, go back to the books question.

45:14

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah,

45:14

Sophie Buonassisi: yeah yeah. We can bounce. Yeah yeah yeah. All right.

45:18

Archana Agrawal: So I mean, two that are on my, bookshelf that I do go back to is the, Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. And I find that to be, just such an honest look at leadership and at leading when there are no playbooks and making the hard decisions. And when you see it from that vantage point, there’s so much admirable about, about that and the lessons learned there.

45:45

Archana Agrawal: The other one is, John McManus, qualified sales leader, which is an incredible way to to sort of learn about really selling value, deep qualification, deep inspection, and, selling up for the customer with the customer and the value that, that you’re able to deliver. So I think there are a couple that I definitely recommend, leaders to go through.

46:11

Sophie Buonassisi: Excellent recommendations. Definitely.

46:14

Sophie Buonassisi: Well, our channel this has been fabulous. Really appreciate the time, the insight, incredible, incredible transformative journey and a huge congratulations.

46:21

Archana Agrawal: Thank you so much. You’ve been such a pleasure to chat today.

46:24

Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah absolutely

The post How Intercom Built the Highest-Performing AI Agent on the Market Using Outcome-Based Pricing appeared first on GTMnow.