Asaf Nevo: Taking Better Decisions Using Data (Full Transcript)
Ronen Ainbinder
Joining us today for the Halftime Snacks is a sports enthusiast and a thriving entrepreneur.
Coming to the show from Israel is a man that left his job to work on his startup, and today, he's the CEO and co-founder of Pico.
Pico is an award-winning platform that aims to improve sports organizations' communication strategy by making the experience with their audiences more personal.
Some of their clients include Borrusia Dortmund, The Portuguese Football Federation, and the Nashville Predators.
It is an honor and a pleasure to host him in the Halftime Snacks;
Ladies and gentlemen, Asaf Nevo!
Asaf Nevo
Thanks for the welcome.
Ronen Ainbinder
It's great to host you, Asaf. Thank you for taking my invitation to the show. I'm delighted to have you here. I want to start straight away by talking about you and your story, your background. Of course, I want to know how you first got involved in the sports business and what has been the process of becoming a sports tech entrepreneur.
Asaf Nevo
It's funny because I'm coming from a different entrepreneurship background. For many years before Pico, I used to own a bar here in Haifa, my hometown. The thing with sports, just as sports fans, and as people who liked the entertainment industry, we just found a big market failure. Then, we started to explore and test and see until we found the right market fit to build what Pico is today. I think that's where everything started as seeing some like market failures that we can jump in and try to fix it.
Ronen Ainbinder
How come you decided to drop your full-time job to devote your whole life to a startup? Given all the uncertainty and all the unknown? What does it take?
Asaf Nevo
It's a good question. I didn't come from a full-time job. I used to own another business for many years. So I'm now 36. And ever since I was 23, I'm in the entrepreneurship space. My first entrepreneurial experience was a bit different. As I said, it was a nightlife business, a bar. Uncertainty is part of my life in the last 15 years. That's not a big issue for me. But we did decide one of the other Pico founders (Roy) and I to sell our stocks and leave the bar to invest all of our time in Pico. We think the decision came, I wouldn't say easily, but it wasn't the hardest decision because we were at the bar for many years. It was working, it was driving, and we came to a point when we wanted a bit more. We wanted a bigger challenge. We wanted to grow in other markets. So it was pretty natural; I have to say it was like something that came out naturally for us.
Ronen Ainbinder
It sounds like you do have the spirit of the entrepreneur. And you can detect the opportunity where it lies. I wonder what did you realize with Pico that like no one else was putting attention in, and then you decided like, "that's a great opportunity."?
Asaf Nevo
Pico evolved from what we started a few years ago to what it is today. I think that as part of this journey, we saw that what we had in mind in the first place changed a lot to find the right market fit and until we found the problem that has what it called "the blue ocean," mot many people are trying to solve and they're still a big enough market to come in and play. I think it took us a lot of A/B testing until we found the right market fit for what we do. And today, while some companies do not maybe compete with us directly, but touch different touching points of what we know how to do. We have established ourselves as the only company that does the full process of creating a fan journey. We understand who the fans are in the digital space, create a data-driven marketing strategy, and understanding how to touchpoint with every fan on every interaction they have with a sports organization. There may be other companies doing some part of this, but we're the only one that does the full cycle. So getting sports teams to be more digital and more innovative is something that we're focused on in the last 2.5-3 years.
Ronen Ainbinder
That's great, Asaf. I want to ask you a little bit about the technology itself. How are you guys at pico leveraging the latest technologies to create engagement between those fans and these brands to do it better than ever before?
Asaf Nevo
Pico is what we call the channel-agnostic tool. We have our basic technology as a stack. Then you can implement it on every digital channel you have when you're engaging with fans. Let's say the average team would have around ten different channels managing communication with fans. It could be Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It could also be a website, an app, text messaging, email campaigns, TikTok, Weibo, if they are working in China, Twitch if they're doing eSports stuff. So there's tons of different channels, and we've built this solution that could pretty much connect and implement in any channel they have. The idea is that once we're in this channel, we're helping the teams to identify the fans that they're in the channel to helping them gather data about them continually. So it's not just your name; at the latest stage, we will learn who your favorite player is, what's your merchandise preferences, and what's your email address, or whatever type of data the team wants to learn about you. Then, we took this data to inject it into the team's infrastructure (their CRM, their systems) to make it accessible to everyone in the organization. From a technology standpoint, we have many machine learning and AI algorithms on the data gathering side, which helps us label the interactions with fans so that we know to get insights about you. For example, if we're showing you a call to actions for buying tickets, and you're clicking it, or maybe purchasing, we're labeling you as someone who's interested in last-minute tickets and also probably notice you're not a season-ticket holder. We do all these automatically. On the other side, after we have data about you, understanding what's the right campaign, or what's the right marketing, whether it's marketing for offers, like tickets and merchandise, but also marketing in terms of which type of content is going to work best for you. We make these decisions based on technology. The idea is to provide you as a fan, the best experience we can with the team with the offers, products, and content you like the most.
Ronen Ainbinder
That's fantastic, Asaf. With all this data gathering and information that you know about the fans and the teams and sports organizations' followers, I wonder if there's any specific lessons that you learned about humans and human behavior? You were surprised by learning through those things that you guys do?
Asaf Nevo
It's a funny question. After all, we've seen one of the things on a very basic level because we're working globally, we have customers in Israel. We have customers in Europe, Borrusia Dortmund and other big teams, we have customers in the US, which are NFL and NBA and NHL teams, we've got our first production from India. We got cricket teams working with us. We have a South African rugby league that works with us. And we are now working on the first Brazilian teams. What we've seen is that in every market, fans behave completely differently. There's always the basics of loving the game, and when they buy tickets or seasonal ticket holders, the basics are the same. But for example, if you as a fan in Israel, or Europe, and the team is made, like a bad decision, let's say that they fire the coach, or the coach made a bad decision, and they lost, you would see in Europe, they will be pissed by it. In Israel, they will send tons of curses. And everything you will try to do with fans during these times will be what you will try to launch something fun, and they will come in and say, "oh, this is what you're spending your money on, this is stupid. You need to learn how to play." They're going to be emotional, really personal. While in the United States, for example, people are usually more polite. It's a very rare case in the States when we see fans like cursing, and really, they're always emotionally involved. But they're personally emotionally involved, cursing the coach or being super mad about something like that. It shows you the sensitivity of the fans, which also helped us on the other side. We know which type of content and offers will be more relevant to fans who are more emotionally involved, or crazy emotion involved, if you may. So we know how to touch the triggers of these fans.
Ronen Ainbinder
Well, that's amazing. You're preparing a strategy based on something that may be rooted in culture, but you can't see it until you see it on the platform. That's amazing stuff. I want to ask you more about organizational culture in Pico. The values that you guys have. You, as the CEO, how do you implement those values? How do you keep reminding your people the way you guys should work? How do you approach this process?
Asaf Nevo
I have to say that personally, from a personal aspect, the growing stage of a company like after, you came up with an idea, and you've tested it, and, and it works. And now you have a good product-market fit, and then you start to grow. And suddenly you have 20 customers, and then you have 40. And now you're getting to the 60, and they're all big teams require a lot of attention, and lots of nurturing and success management, account management. One of the things that I was surprised about is how challenging the growth stage is, like the fact that you're growing, that's a challenge. But I never thought that this is going to be challenging, but it is. From a cultural standpoint, we are always trying to think of the customer's eyes, not only about what we want to show them. It's more about helping them tell the story. We always focus on the stories. We see lots of very interesting data, which is all always owned by the team as a side note. And it's never been used for evil purposes. It's never been sold to anyone. It's only being built to provide a better experience for the fans. We always try to help the teams and the people we work with to tell a better story, whether it's a better story for the fans or a better story internally. If I'm working with the VP of growth, I will help him build a story of how he leverages data to grow the company. If I'm working with a digital marketer, we will help them build a story focused on how content now provides performance and provides data and not only likes and comments and shares. Our culture is very customer-centric in understanding what we can do to make the customer's life easier and have a new and innovative story internally because we are educating the market. We're helping the market grow and understand that they could do better with the amazing engagement they're having out of the box. And I think these also go down inside their organization to always think about how we can make their lives easier as we're trying to make their fans' lives easier.
Ronen Ainbinder
I want to double-tap a little bit on what you've said about the power of good storytelling. Why would you say that a good story would impact fans and followers better than just providing stats or facts or plain information that is not really like engaging? Why would you think that a good story would go way further than just something raw?
Asaf Nevo
I think it's kind of like the nature of the human being. I think that we especially today when there are so many channels and so many distractions and so many attractions and things that you want to digest and read and videos you want to watch. It has to be interesting. I don't think stats and raw information is irrelevant. I'm just not sure it's relevant for everybody. So unless you are a real fan, diehard fans who are loving the team, I would say most of the stats are not that relevant for you—people like myself who follow teams around the globe. I'm not into the big details. When you have someone like Erling Haaland, in his first game provided three goals. It's a frickin sensation! And it's not about stats. It's about "He's a legend!" and the amount of expectations and then the amount of good noise that it brings to the team is amazing. So I think telling a story you could tell this is Erling Haaland, which is his height, which is his weight. And this is how many goals he scored at the last team, etc. You cant it to the fact that when he got in, he scored three. Nothing could beat that. And I think most people with the level of attention they're able to provide to the team make it easier for them to digest and get the highlights. But they think it's also speaking of organizations, and it's also internally. As an organization, we have a lot of data, which is something we're getting for our customers and internal data, the data flow, we have account management's data, we have fundraising and all that. In the end, you always need to build a story. You always need to make sure the dots are connected because it's just too hard to connect all the dots on your own. So I think wrapping everything in good storytelling helps everybody stay connected and aligned with the main goal.
Ronen Ainbinder
That's fascinating, Asaf. Now that you mentioned data and how you guys use data and the amount of data we have. There's somewhere I read that the amount of data collected in the last five years, or the next five years, was going to be more than all the data accumulated in the history of humankind—this discussion around data and how machines are taking over humans in a sense. I wonder, what's your take? What's your opinion about the way data is going to make decisions for us in the future? Do you think that data and machines will replace the way sports organizations and other companies and maybe governments decide on the country? Or is there a point where data will be limited, and human psychology will understand better? And that's how they're going to make decisions? How will it look like in the future, with all these like revolutions of data?
Asaf Nevo
I'm not a big fan of robots and machines replacing. I do think that although all the data we have, still, there's something, there's still a missing link, that that has to be human. And that's the ability not to process the data as much as it is to serve the data. One of the biggest problems in almost all markets is the ability to serve the data. I'll give you an example from my world. And I think that COVID also shows pretty much the same thing and how governments manage these cases. Sometimes, the political debate is beating the data debate. Sometimes decisions are not made only based on data. In Pico, we have seen that their sports teams, although they're not always able to use all the data, do have a lot of data. But one thing that they're sometimes struggling with is connecting all the dots. So even if you're connecting all the dots for them, this is part of what we do. Someone is sitting on the other end. And this person, his role is to decide what's going out and what's not, in terms of what content will go out which marketing campaigns will go out. And what we are trying to create a process in which everything is very, very easy for them to say yes or no. So they don't need to look at the data as a raw thing. They don't need to make decisions based on the data. They need to have the data that digested and fit in decide yes or no, kind of like Tinder (swipe right, swipe left). That's the idea. I'll give you an example. Let's say, if you are an LA Lakers and we have data about your fans, our goal is to be able to come in and say, hey, it's Christmas time now in two months from now. And we see that you have 30,000 fans in the database who like LeBron and expressed interest in a jersey. That's a good time now to send them out a jersey-Christmas promotion, yes or no? This ability to connect between those dots and make business decisions based on different labeling and properties about specific friend groups. That's what makes things much more efficient. I think Facebook does it well in the way they're marketing to users. But I think other organizations that are not Facebook are struggling with building this data set to help them make decisions that way. No matter how much data you have in the world, no matter how stronger machines are, the accessibility to the data, or how you're serving the data, that's what makes the real difference. Because not all companies are Facebook from a technical standpoint, not all companies are Google from a technical standpoint, or Amazon, not every company could come in and create a strategy that the machine automates everything. So that's not realistic to my understanding. But they think that every company could expect to have everything pre-digested in a way that they need to decide whether and which part of the data they're going to use.
Ronen Ainbinder
Wow, that's fascinating, Asaf. I'd say my prediction is in the next five years. We're going to see a very significant boom in the digesting side that you mentioned. I'm sure you are one of the big players in the sports tech industry, but I think it's going to go across like multiple sectors and industries around if they're not already there. Because this is like the time that we're going to see it happen the most, it will become trending, I believe. And I think you guys are riding a nice wave. Of course, it is a fantastic industry, the sports industry. I'm sure it's going to be great for you guys in the next coming years, especially now with how engagement needs to be raised due to lack of attendance in stadiums and how people need to feel like they're in the game while they're at home. I think they you guys are going to have a lot of things cooking up in the next coming months or years to keep growing and keep doing great things. Since we're running out of time, I can't leave this interview without asking you a more personal question, Assaf. Since you're a great entrepreneur and your mindset is amazing. And you radiate amazing vibes. I want to ask you about one of three books that have greatly influenced your life. And why would you choose those specific ones?
Asaf Nevo
It might not be the book you were expecting to hear. But I read a book called The Challenger Sale. I started reading it initially when we started to grow, and we started to have lots of powerful parallel deal cycles or sales cycles. And we try to like crack up how we can position ourselves so that it's going to be a must-have for the teams. It was like two years ago. And speaking of data, the challenger sale is a book about how you're creating a high-performance salesperson. It's a book written based on a study made by two individuals called Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. And they made a study across 300 different SaaS platforms and the way they're selling, and they tried to come up with the data. And what they found out is the highlight of the book. That's why the book made such a big hype in the sales industry.
While we always think that customers will buy in because you are their best friends and because you're going to take them to dinners and everything, they saw that customers would most likely buy if you challenge them. Suppose you are making them think and if you're asking them the tough questions, and not if you are not necessary if you are, just the slick salesperson that always says the right words. It's more about if you are a high-performance salesperson, you need to come into the room, and you need to control the room. It would be best to ask questions that will make them sometimes feel uncomfortable or challenged positively. And the fact they show that in a high-performance salesperson, almost none of them was the sticky type or the best friend type. They were all challengers, they all knew how to come in and spot on the problem and spot on the solution for the problem in a way that the customer was unable to say no, and they think I wouldn't say life-changing. It was super interesting for us to see how we can adapt a lot of this in our organization, in our sales processes, how we can challenge our prospects to help us close more deals. It is one of the latest books I remember reading, which I enjoyed, based on data and not based on one or a second sales approach. The book was based on a real study. So it's super interesting. And it's my recommendation. If you're dealing with sales or growing a business, go out and read it because it's going to it's going to change the way you're thinking of things.
Ronen Ainbinder
It's going to go straight up into my must-read list right now; it sounds like a great book. And I think that's a great place to wrap today's conversation. I want to thank you so much for your time for your insights, and of course, your kindness. You're a great guy, a great entrepreneur, I'm sure you're going to have lots of success all your life, and I'm looking forward to it. But for now, thank you for coming and snacking with me!
Asaf Nevo
Thanks a lot. It's been a super pleasure, and I hope we can meet in person soon!
Transcribed by Otter.