Founder to Founder : Running a Company When AI Changes Everything

Hélène Clary, CRO and co-founder of ClicData, joins Telmo Silva for a candid conversation about building and scaling a SaaS sales and marketing engine across North America and Europe. From the death of generic outbound to the real impact of AI on the BI market, this episode covers 20 years of hard-won lessons, including what it’s like to co-found a company with your life partner and navigate life inside a large enterprise group after acquisition.

Questions We Asked

• Is outbound sales still relevant in a world saturated with AI-generated messages and LinkedIn spam?
• How does data culture differ between North America and Europe, and how should you adapt your sales approach?
• Is AI helping or hurting the market for data analytics platforms right now?

What We Learned

• Content builds trust, not leads. It works best with technical audiences who research before they ever talk to a vendor.
• Generic outbound is dead. The only version that still works is handcrafted, targeted and combined with other channels.
• AI is sending people back to basics. Companies chasing AI keep hitting the same wall: their data is not ready for it.
• North America and Europe are not the same sale. One wants the recipe, the other just wants the dish.

From Pharma to SaaS: Building a Sales Culture Around Education

Hélène Clary started her career in pharmaceutical marketing, working across Germany, Mexico, Canada and France. In a highly regulated and largely non-digital industry, she learned to align marketing with sales and operate in service of field teams rather than against them. That consultative mindset followed her into ClicData, where the founding mandate was simple: make data management and analytics accessible to everyone.

In the early days, that meant building an inbound marketing machine before inbound was even a recognized strategy. The approach was educational rather than promotional, creating content that helped people understand what to measure and why, not just what ClicData could do. That foundation still holds today. For technical audiences, content-driven trust remains the most reliable path to a qualified conversation.

The End of Generic Outbound and the Data Culture Gap

The outbound debate has evolved significantly. After experimenting with high-volume outreach, ClicData shifted to a tightly targeted, fully customized approach. Fewer contacts, more research, a handcrafted story every time. The result is fewer meetings but far more qualified ones. Outbound is not dead, but generic outbound is. And the data culture gap between geographies shapes everything: in the US and Canada, a C-level will get into APIs and pipeline architecture in a first conversation. In France, that same conversation would end the deal.

AI: A Tailwind and a Headwind for the BI Market

What’s interesting on the market is that AI is helping us in some ways and is really not helping us in other ways.
Hélène Clary, CRO, ClicData.

On the AI question, the picture is nuanced. The explosion of interest in AI has created urgency around data readiness, pushing more organizations to invest in centralizing and cleaning their data. That is a direct tailwind for ClicData. But it has also amplified unrealistic expectations, particularly among audiences who were already skeptical of the complexity behind building a reliable dashboard.

Life After Acquisition: Navigating Growth Inside a Larger Group

The episode closes on the acquisition by TeamSystem and the real adjustment it demands from a team built on speed: more people to align, more processes to navigate, and more time between decision and action.