The AI-Powered Evolution of Sales: Insights from Alexa Grabell, CEO and Co-Founder of Pocus

In a recent episode of "Why Work Here" with Amit Matani, CEO of Wellfound, we had the privilege of speaking with Alexa Grabell, CEO and co-founder of Pocus, an AI prospecting platform revolutionizing how sales teams build pipeline. Founded in 2021, Pocus has quickly gained significant traction with enterprise clients like monday.com, Canva, and Asana, generating half a billion dollars in pipeline each quarter for their customers.

Watch the full episode on YouTube below or on Spotify.

From Sales Ops to AI Innovator

Grabell's journey to founding Pocus began in sales operations, where she found herself building internal tools to help sales teams access dispersed data more efficiently. "I was essentially building Pocus internally, taking data that lived all over the place to help our sellers figure out what they need to know about prospects or customers and how to engage with them thoughtfully," she explains.

After leaving her role at Data Miner, Grabell attended Stanford Business School, where she met her co-founder. Together, they launched Pocus with a clear vision: "to supercharge sales teams" by helping them "spend their time selling and not just digging through a bunch of data."

Embracing the AI Revolution

What's particularly fascinating about Pocus's evolution is how the company has adapted to the rapid emergence of AI technologies, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs). Though founded before the recent AI boom, Pocus has seamlessly integrated these advancements into their platform.

"We're still at the very, very, very beginning days of AI and sales, which is exciting," Grabell notes. "Since AI has gotten extremely popular and buzzy... it's just accelerated the timeline of how quickly we think we can truly disrupt [sales]."

When asked about navigating this technological shift, Grabell emphasized the importance of staying focused on solving core problems: "It was a tricky balance of not wanting to build AI for the sake of AI and really digging in to find the core problem that needs to be solved and then building it with AI."

Rather than viewing AI as a replacement for sales professionals, Pocus takes a different approach. "We didn't take the belief that AI can replace sellers just yet," Grabell states. "Instead, we took the belief that AI can supercharge sales teams and actually make sales so much more efficient that, in theory, they can have double the size of their books. So leaders can hire fewer, smarter reps that have this AI co-pilot that can help them do more and better."

How Pocus Works

At its core, Pocus is powered by sophisticated AI agents that learn everything about their customers and their customers' businesses. As Grabell describes it:

"We have a series of AI agents called knowledge agents that learn everything about our customers as well as their customers. It's scraping internal data like your CRM, your product usage, your call recordings and external data, so podcasts, 10-Ks, news, bringing that together and then feeding that into something called a relevance agent."

This relevance agent becomes "as smart as your average sales rep" and provides actionable recommendations: "These are the leads you prioritize. This is the strategy for how you're going to go after them. And here's actually how you outbound."

Building a High-Velocity Culture

Pocus has achieved remarkable growth in a short time, which Grabell attributes to relentless customer focus and rapid iteration. "A lot of it is blood, sweat, and tears of just spending so much time with customers—in their office, in their brains, trying to unpack how we can become so sticky and core to their business."

The company's culture reflects this high-velocity approach, with three core values driving their work:

1. Ship-erate: "'Ship and iterate' means don't overthink decisions. Get something out there, learn, and then we'll fix it later," explains Grabell. "It's this mindset of acting with extreme urgency and always asking yourself, is this the best use of my time right now and how can I do it as fast as possible?"
2. Delusional Optimism: "There's always going to be problems, and we are biased that we're going to be the winners in the space, even though it's a massive opportunity and people might think we're crazy."
3. Humble Overachievers: "There's no ego. It's a very flat hierarchy. Everyone just works hard and does whatever it takes."

This approach extends to their product development process, which always begins with customer insights. "It always starts with customers or prospects," Grabell says. "Once we start to hear themes over and over again, to the point where you feel like you get on a call and you know exactly what the person's going to say before they even say it, that's when you say, 'Okay, there's something there.'"

From there, the team creates rough prototypes, gathers feedback, and builds MVPs that are intentionally imperfect. "The MVP should be ugly. It should be buggy. It should be not perfect," Grabell insists. "The goal is just to get it out there and get feedback as fast as possible."

Talent Selection: The Three-Layer Framework

Pocus has developed a structured approach to evaluating talent, using a three-layer framework:

Layer 1: Individual Attributes "They have to be smart. They have to be humble. They have to be optimistic. They have to be curious," Grabell explains.

Layer 2: Cultural Fit "Will they thrive, not just survive, but thrive in Pocus's culture? Do they have a high bar of excellence? Can they work at a fast pace? Are they scrappy? Are they collaborative?"

Layer 3: Role-Specific Skills "Do they have the right skills and experience for this specific job?"

Interestingly, Grabell prioritizes the first two layers above specific skills. "Layer one and layer two are more important to me than anything. Like if you have an ego, if you kind of are pessimistic, if you lead with direction versus curiosity, you're not gonna survive here or enjoy it here. So to me, those are non-negotiables."

The skills, by contrast, can be learned if someone has the right aptitude. "The things that are negotiable are the skills and expertise... how fast I think someone's slope is. So can they learn really, really fast on the job?"

To assess candidates against this framework, Pocus uses a combination of traditional interviews, take-home assignments, and live role-playing scenarios with real business problems. Grabell also emphasizes the importance of in-person interactions: "Spending three hours with someone, working on a problem in person and then going out to dinner with them, you can just learn so much more than these Zoom interviews."

Looking to the Future

With an eye toward continued growth, Pocus is focusing on building a repeatable sales engine that can scale efficiently. "How do we make sure that we're not scaling linearly revenue to people? We're making it really, really efficient," Grabell notes.

The company's ambitious five-year vision positions them as the centerpiece of a new AI-native sales tech stack. "Our vision is to supercharge sales teams. For us, we are the go-to stack for sales prospecting," Grabell says. "There is this legacy tech stack of what I'll call SaaS-first tools for prospecting—think Zoom Info, SixSense, Outreach, all these tools—those won't exist. Pocus is the place that you go for that."

Why Join Pocus?

For candidates considering Pocus, Grabell offers a compelling pitch focused on three key aspects:

1. Massive Market Opportunity: "When you think about the sales tech landscape, there is just going to be a totally different tech stack that is all AI native and AI first. And it's going to fundamentally change the way we work. We are in the beginning, beginning, beginning of it. And so getting in now and looking back 10 years from now, it's going to be like a 'holy shit' moment of how big we get."
2. Real Impact with Big Customers: "We are a tiny startup, but we do have big customers where we're generating 70% of their pipeline. And so you get the benefit of having real customers and real value, but also a small and scrappy team."
3. Accelerated Growth and Learning: "You're going to work really, really hard, but you'll have fun, and you'll completely advance your career just by getting exposure and opportunities that you wouldn't get elsewhere."

Takeaways

Pocus represents the vanguard of AI-powered sales tools, with a vision to fundamentally transform how sales teams operate. By focusing relentlessly on customer needs, embracing rapid iteration, and building a culture of humble high-achievers, they're creating a new paradigm for sales effectiveness in the AI era.

For sales professionals, tech talent, and founders alike, Alexa Grabell's insights offer valuable lessons on navigating technological disruption, building high-performance teams, and creating a culture that can deliver extraordinary results in a rapidly evolving landscape.

Why Work Here is a series in which Amit Matani, CEO of Wellfound, has honest, behind-the-scenes conversations with founders, executives, and employees about why their companies are worth joining.