James Shannon (Sales Executive) Linkedin10 Dec 2025 16:54
Https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-shannon-music/
Very excited to share that Cykel has been able to increase MRR by 104.8% over the last 5 months!
When I joined the team in July, my mission was to find product-market fit for our AI sales tool, own GTM, and channel customer feedback to product.
For the first couple months 60% of my time was demos. I broke down every call into industry, company size, use case, pain points, and features requested. This gave us 2-3 ideal customer profiles where we knew we could win.
Then we needed to figure out how to differentiate against the other 100+ companies in this space.
Our unlock: When everyone has the same features, the differentiator is how easy you make them to use. So we positioned and built to become the easiest way to generate go-to-market intelligence.
Where we're seeing success:
- Teams with 4+ GTM tools who want to consolidate to one that actually works.
- Founders and AEs who don't have time for consistent outbound.
Key learnings from the trenches:
- Enterprise deployments of AI are tricky, focusing on single use cases/pain point is best.
- The whole belief that an AI SDR can automate everything is a fantasy. Reality is 70% automated + 30% human. And that's exactly the sweet spot right now.
Massive shoutout to the product team for building a sick platform and our customers who bet on simplicity over complexity!