Recursive GTM, Starting With One Seller

Julia Nimchinski:

Thanks. And next up, we Welcome, Vivian. Ryan Radcliffe. Director of Product Marketing, and Russell Bitham, VP of Product at Vivin. Welcome back, how are you doing?

Ryan Radcliff:

Thanks for having us. This is gonna be great. Julia, we are so excited for today, and for sort of showing you our part of this. I’m just gonna start with a little bit of context. I think a lot of what people are hearing about today is about big systems, right?

Systems that learn across thousands of accounts. change how a whole sales team works, and that’s a big shift, but we’re looking at things in a different way today. We wanted to start with one seller. What does it look like when a system is learning from you on your calls in your week? And that’s really what Hero is. How we define Hero is as an AI sales teammate.

It’s joining your calls, it’s connecting to the tools that you use, and it’s really learning how you sell. And then it uses that to help you, right? It preps you before the call, it’s helping you during the call in a very low latency way, and then it’s handling a lot of follow-up after, right? It’s this full cycle for a seller.

But here’s the important part, it doesn’t stay the same As it joins more calls, as it learns more about your deals and how you work. It’s really becoming more and more specific to how you work, and getting that specificity really dialed in. And that’s really what I’m excited to have Russell show us today, is it’s not just a list of features, it’s what really changes as Hero learns.

And a real thing to… before Russell jumps in, you don’t need a long buying process to try Hero. You don’t need to enter into a big situation, with us. If you’re a Hard Skill Exchange member, you can get Hero 90 days for free. You can download it and onboard right from our website, rather than the 28-day typical.

We have a longer promotion that we’re doing for anybody who’s listening, if they want to really try this for months. I’ll put the link in the chat, and with that, Russell, please, take it away.

Russell Witham:

Awesome. Oh, yeah, it’s great to be here, too. And, of course, I want to make things interactive, so it’s all about, like you were saying, Ryan, what does it mean for us to set yourself up with, recursive processes, with things that are gonna create incredible leverage for you? And with our product hero, we think about how key it is to really create efficiencies for sellers.

Before their calls. in the middle of their calls, and after their calls. And so, I’m gonna walk through all three phases of that today. And, what better way to do that than to be a… product leader who doesn’t have enough time to prep for his meetings and had to come and do a demo today at Hardscale Exchange. So, I went ahead and I was thinking about this. This is a flow that I know so many, so many sellers go through.

But with Hero, one of the things that you can do, and I actually did this just a few minutes ago today. Is you can codify things that you do on a regular basis, in the… codify the things we do on a regular basis, in persistent skills that you can use in the product.

And so, what I did earlier today, right before this, is I wanted to do some prep for this call, that I was going to do this demo with Ryan, and I wanted to be able to showcase some of the things we’ve shipped into the product recently. And one of the requests that we’d heard so much from sellers in the field is that it’s wonderful to be able to have a capability that can obviously transcribe your conversation.

That’s what Kiro is doing for me right now, taking notes on the things that are going on. But, you know, that’s sort of table stakes. Like, you can get transcription from a lot of different applications in the market right now. It’s really, I think, for us, what can you do with that?

And one of the things that was so key, and you can see this sort of tracking along the side here in the conversation, is how I can, you know, make sure I’m keeping tabs of what I intended to do in the conversation. And as Ryan and I are talking here, what our application here is doing is it’s is it’s understanding, okay, what topics have we covered? Ryan did a great job in the lead-in.

He already got us onto a good head start of how Hero can help as a live teammate. And… Also, obviously, I mentioned I wanted to showcase our new agenda mode, which we have been putting out and we’re about to release, to all of our customers. So, that offer that Ryan was mentioning at the top, you can go try this out for yourselves in the very, very near future.

And, one of the, one of the key things is, obviously, how you can, with very little effort, take into account all of the things, all the context you might have that we’ve accumulated with you that is accumulating in other applications as well.

So you’ll note as an example here, just what’s on my screen, you know, prep isn’t just about like, it’s not just about like what are the past means that you have, but it’s also about the other interconnected applications. And so for a seller, of course, that might mean, you know, the whole set of tools like CRM connector.

Like, your classic marketing operations tools, productivity tools, and so, you know, in our sort of org, in our sort of setup, you end up with, you know, of course I’m connected to G Suite, so my email, my Google Drive. you know, Calendar, of course, but then also Slack. We use Salesforce for our CRM, but we also use HubSpot in our organization for main marketing use case, and then also, of course.

I’m an R&D, so connecting into linear. But with all of that context, then, what Hero is able to do is take these persistent sayings that I’ve given, these skills that I’ve specified, and be able to then proactively put together an agenda for me, and then, just as I’m showing here, track along this in a conversation.

And one of the things that we’ve given a lot of thought to is, is not just how do you do all this in a really low-latency environment, so, right, you know, be able to transcribe, understand the nature of the conversation, summarize what’s happening, but then also, there’s a criticality, for us of, like, how you do this in a way that still allows you to engage thoughtfully in the conversation that you’re in.

And, you know, when… When I think about this, like, I don’t necessarily… not everyone’s on a multiple… multi-mod or sub. Not everyone has, you know, an ability to sit here and say glance and pay great attention to a buyer, right, ask awesome questions, right, understand their pain, understand their needs, while also monitoring another application on the side.

And so, what we’ve given a lot of energy to developing on our end, I’ll zoom it back over to my primary screen so I can show you. Here in just a second, hopefully, is, I’ll actually shift… I’ll shift, bar. my application window so I can show you instead what, what I’ve got over here, is you can have a… there we go.

You can have this minified experience, that will show you not just, you know, a big application, but, give you a little minified take on what’s going on, you know, how are the topics progressing in the conversation, and also. While Hero’s also tracking here, if, you know, Julie asked me a question, if there was an objection that I was handling as a buyer, I can also ask Hero for some assistance.

I can have it catch me up on the conversation, or give me a thought on what I might handle, what I might address next. And so you know, heroes, heroes probably got better thoughts than I do on this. If I would just listen and let it let it take the lead. The only reason this is actually visible is because I enabled a special mode right before this conversation so I could show this live on the screen.

But in reality, this is typically invisible to our users. So that’s the whole design on our end that you could be sharing your screen and no one would be any any wiser. on the fact I was looking at some assistance there on the side, helping me track along with the conversation, handle the things that come in. And then… you know, I mentioned that there’s this, like, there’s this three-part arc to any conversation.

There’s what happens before the call, so prep that I might be doing. There’s what happens on the call, showing how Hero can help me track along as I’m checking off the things in my agenda, as I’m hitting the topics that I wanted to address, making some help with questions or objections that come up along the way.

But then also, and I’ll pull back the primary version of the application again onto my screen, what happens after the call? And, for the sake of… the sake of a demo here, I’ll go ahead and stop… stop here. I’ll ask it to stop listening into what Ryan and I are demoing. And in a matter of seconds, you know, when you wrap any conversation, you’re gonna get a transcription and a summary of what happened on your call.

I’ll pop in here into my… my meeting thread here in just a second. And, you know. the question is then, what do you do with that transcript? Great to have one, but okay, what can I actually handle with that? What can I… what can I make sure to, hit as a follow-up? And I’ll show you sort of an example of how I did this just earlier today when I was doing a dry run.

But again, you have codified information in the application where you can. You can choose to have Hero automatically process and talk about what you might do next. You know, again, we’re connected into your email and other tools. So if you wanted to say update your CRM, if you wanted to send a follow-up note to your prospects, that’s something that we help you with along the way here.

That sort of… that sort of gives you a little bit of a feel, a little bit of a understanding of, you know, when we think about, this, like, three parts of a conversation, how we think about the assistance of Hero playing a role on that. But then additionally, what I’d say is, like. it’s not just about any given meeting, right?

There’s a whole series of threads that tie together as part of a particular buyer interaction that we’re having. And so. On our end, with Hero, also, Hero has a progressive memory system. So, on an ongoing basis, every single meeting, every single conversation I’m in, that’s being extracted and learned from.

And so then when I come in to my next meeting, maybe it’s, you know, I’m meeting a buyer who I’ve already connected with for a second time, and I’m trying to advance that conversation forward. Or maybe it’s a brand new conversation.

I’m taking the learnings, taking the lessons from what I’ve already experienced, whether on that deal or on other deals, and that’s being leveraged as part of the assistance that I’m getting, it’s being leveraged as part of the suggestions that I’m receiving. It allows me to get better and better and better in every single interaction. So you have this really amazing compounding effect that happens there.

And the only thing I need to do, as a seller in this case. show up. have Hero record the call in the background, and I get that assistance along the way, and I can power my whole life cycle of before, before, on, and after the call.

So, it’s probably a good spot for me to pause. you know, Ryan, see what, her things you might want to highlight there, Julia, you know, what questions we might have, but, a little bit of a showcase into how we think about, progressive learning, how we think about the key stages of, interactions as part of a, as part of a buying lifecycle.

Julia Nimchinski:

Amazing presentation. My first question is, we typically address the problem of context, and it seems like the more context, the better, obviously, for any AI tool. You began this session by actually opening up that Any amount of context is enough. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Russell Witham:

and.

Julia Nimchinski:

Yeah, curious to your take on this.

Russell Witham:

Oh, just, you know, the… on what… how much context is required, Julie, is the nature of the question.

Julia Nimchinski:

Yeah, in order to actually see some feasible results from, you know, in this case, obviously, hero deployment.

Russell Witham:

Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, the… the thing, too, is, we’ve had the great benefit on our end of observing, sellers at many of the, you know, best sales orgs on the planet for many years now. And so. It often… oftentimes. you know, you don’t need a whole lot of context to be able to provide assistance to someone, even if you’re, say, meeting with someone for the very first time.

So let’s imagine a scenario, Julia, where, you know, I’m on a first call with a buyer, and I don’t know much about them at this point. Like, maybe I’m still doing initial discovery. You know, one of the key things is there’s often there’s often, like, best practice that the, you know, the best sellers in the organization, the best sellers at every organization tend to… tend to apply.

And then also, especially when you have proactive assistance from an agent like Hero, there’s often things that you can go and learn about the environment, right? You know, if I very… just in the act of, like, having a conversation with someone, I probably have a sense of, like. of course, where they work, like, and I can go and do some proactive research.

Like, what do I… what do I know about, you know, Acme Corp based on… based on the news? Like, you know, how… how were their latest financial results in, you know, their, most recent quarter? Has there been, like. key industry news that I should be aware of, and start to build up a hypothesis that might inform that discovery.

And, you know, that’s not just possible, like I’m saying, with, say, web research, but also, interconnected tools that you might have to your organization.

So, a key example we see is, you know, we’re very aware, just in terms of, like, how much time we spend with key leaders in the industry of, you know, there often can be heavy turnover in orgs, so perhaps it might be your first time. meeting with a prospect, talking to an account, but maybe there’s actually a history that exists in the organization in the past, like a life cycle, a buying cycle that, you know, happened a couple years ago, and maybe there’s, you know, information on that that you weren’t attached to at all, that your manager wasn’t attached to at all.

But if you have an agent that’s capable of going and doing proactive research, you can go and somewhat tirelessly look through the source systems and dig up information. And even if there isn’t things that you can find, you can still lean on sort of like the best practice of an agent in Hero that’s been designed on, you know, what are these best practices? Like in what ways are the very best sellers proactive, right?

How do they approach their craft? And Hero sort of brings that to every conversation, even if it’s the very first time, even if there’s maybe nothing in your internal source systems that you can use as context.

Julia Nimchinski:

Amazing. Ryan, anything to add?

Ryan Radcliff:

No, I mean, I was… I tried to drop a link in the chat, but it didn’t work. I realized you just went to us, but I’m going to share my screen and kind of show folks… how easy it is to kind of get activated with something like this, right? You just go to meethero.ai. It’s our simple URL. And click sign up to download.

And then we’ll take you through a human-led onboarding process where it just takes about 10 minutes. we sit with you, we want to talk about your use cases, we want to talk about what systems that you want to attach to Hero.

And what I love about that is, like, we really want to get to know every single customer and find out, you know, what their use cases are and what systems they really need, because Every day we’re adding more and more data sources to Hero. We want to hear what data sources you need, right, as a seller. And so I love that process that we’re doing of human-led onboarding.

So if folks are interested, sign up through here, meethero.ai, book a slot, and we’d love to get you trying it out. It also can concurrently run with any other note-taking software that you have. So don’t feel like you are having to rip and replace what you’re currently using. You can really try out Hero, without having to really make a big change in, in your existing, software.

Julia Nimchinski:

Thanks, Ryan. We just shared it in the chat. And just to double down on this, differentiation note. Could you just speak more to your customers’ results?

And, you know, we just ran a fall in our, community, and, it’s really confusing for a majority of our members to really figure out, you know, how do you know, like, whether it’s Vivin, or Hero by Vivin, or, you know, name a competitor, what’s the difference, actually? And there’s a new tool popping up every day almost. So what’s your main key differentiation and Couple of customer stories.

Ryan Radcliff:

Yeah, absolutely. So the way we look at it is that Vivint is the developing company, and then Hero is the suite of products. We have Hero, and we also have Hero Enterprise, right? As two different motions.

And then the real differentiator that we do, there’s a lot of things that are going to help you before the call and after the call, but a big differentiator for us is this Instantaneous low latency ability to help you on a call.

Capture what’s going on in the call, and then have that build… fortify and build value into everything happening before and after the call, where you can really, as a seller, you can have one place that you go to start your day, run your calls, end your day. automate the end part of a call and get back to the prospecting and the stuff that you really do well as a seller, the stuff that you actually want to do as a seller.

And so that’s a big differentiator for us, is People hear about this, they get excited about what we’re doing, they go off and they want to build it themselves, right? It’s so easy for people, as we just heard at the very beginning of this hour, talking about hackathons, right? And getting in and building your own things.

Folks go off, they leave us, they try to build this themselves. there’s a really difficult part of this to achieve by yourself, and it’s that… it’s that fast recall. It’s that low latency. It’s really difficult on a call to get something that is actually usable in that moment, and we have that moat. with Hero, which is very cool.

I think another big differentiator for us is the actual proof that we’re giving people beyond. beyond just efficiencies, right? As I’m a reader of Gartner, and as companies talk a lot about saving you time, what we’re increasingly finding out more and more is that people aren’t actually getting back to work with that time. Right?

They’re not actually putting that time back into more prospecting as often as we would want them to do. So what’s great about Hero is we have proven with customers like ADP that they’re actually moving deals faster, right? They’re having fewer calls, answering tough questions in the moment, getting things buttoned up in that moment.

So they’re moving deals faster, they’re closing deals faster, and then I think because people are prepping more efficiently. They are having time on the back end with automation. They’re ending they’re actually closing bigger deals. Because I think there’s, like, a better confidence coming into these calls, which makes a lot of sense.

Because when you think about customers like ADP, oftentimes these sellers are selling into personas that aren’t like them, right? They’re selling into highly regulated industries. And so these people really need this confidence between themselves and this other person on the line, for these deals to really, like, get to where the seller wants them to go. And, and I think we’re helping them do that.

Russell Witham:

Mhmm. Yeah. No. It’s it’s interesting, Ryan, what you’re mentioning about, the low latency dynamics.

I was actually just talking about this with a with a prospect of ours the other day. you know, increasingly, we sort of, like, we see the transformation of agents, you know, you can think about Claude, like Codex, obviously, you know, other agents or tools you might be using yourself, capable of longer and longer running incredible work that they can do.

Like, and it’s remarkable, like, when you look at, like, the acceleration that that has for, like, the R&D process that I see my team have at Vivint, and, you know, Julie, as you were mentioning, you see new procs spring up every day. That’s now possible. You can have an idea and, you know, bring a proc to life very quickly now.

And… The… as incredible as that is, This… there’s… there’s some really… Challenging technical details around how you can. have a live conversation and bring knowledge to bear as part of that.

And so I’ll sort of give an anecdote here, but we’ve actually done quite a bit of user research around this, and what we found is that to… Be able to use information, actually be able to like use context you’re given on a live call. That information usually needs to arrive within about a second and a half to two seconds of when a point last landed.

So, right, if you know Julia asks, you ask me a question, between the time that you finish your question, I probably have to have had that information within about a second and a half. for it to have any meaningful impact on what I might do next, what I might say next in the conversation.

Because when you sort of think about it and you can just like next conversation you’re in, you can sort of think about the natural pauses that we tend to have in conversation just as people. that’s sort of about the timeframe that you have there. And then also, like, you have to scan information, obviously, if you’re gonna leverage it in any capacity.

And that’s… you think about that incredible long-run work I was mentioning, if you use a tool like a Claude or a Codex. But that’s not information you’re going to be getting back in a second and a half. It’s information that might take minutes to return, which is powerful. There’s ways you might be able to use that as part of, like, your flow if you’re talking to someone.

But for it to actually have meaningful value as part of a live conversation, there’s a lot of technical barriers you have to jump through, starting with, like. how do you have, like, the real-time communication layer and the speech-to-text layer that’s part of taking a call and having that happen? in fractions of a second, and then how do you then take what’s going on in this conversation?

Like, you know, even think about the one we’re in right now, where we’re talking about a product called Hero, and, like, the capabilities that it has, and what it intends to do for sellers before, on, and after calls. And you look at those dynamics. And then you go, okay, how… how can you… how can you actually pull back information about that? And that becomes a really, really interesting technical set of challenges.

And, you know, that’s… that’s a spot that we focus a lot on at Vivin with our product hero. But yeah, other questions for us, Julia, while we’re we have a few minutes.

Julia Nimchinski:

Yeah, real-time conversation, that’s the killer use case. Interesting, and a question from the audience. How does Hero learn, the products the company is selling? And how much detail can it capture? And who are your competitors?

Russell Witham:

Yeah, no, in terms of our learning process, part of that, and we’ve actually seen some of the most powerful learning, is just the sort of the passive learning that happens.

And one of the ways that often we suggest this to our customers, they’re coming online, is really, it’s just when you start recording conversations that can lead to the accumulation of this knowledge, but then also our Practice Course has capabilities to reach into all those connected tools I was mentioning.

And be able to go in and learn about your organization, learn about the products that you sell, and again, like, you know, sort of the process I was showing earlier today, you can task Hero with going in and learning about your product lines, learning about the capabilities that you have, leveraging, like, Confluence, Notion, you know, if we think about, like, tools in the enablement space, like a Seismic or a Highspot, going in, tapping into all those resources to pull that information back, and then having that as a baseline foundation.

So, like, there’s a lot of different, you know, tools that are in use in different organizations. Some organizations have, like, incredible documentation on the public web that really outline their products well. Others, it’s, you know, perhaps gated, but we have an ability to tap into that and use that to learn about our products.

In terms of the competitive space, you know, it’s… there’s a lot of different tools that you could talk about there. If you’re thinking about more, like, the enterprise end, often, like, Gong and, like, the tools… set of tools around that are often, ones that come up quite a bit. The reality with Gong, of course, is it’s, you know, we often… what we hear from sellers is, like, who is Gong for?

Is Gong for the sellers, or is it for their managers and their leaders? And often, if you ask a seller, you’ll find out where they sort of fall on that dynamic. And then also, what we’ve seen is lots and lots of very creative use cases from individuals who are starting to pick up tools like, ones like Granola, they’ve gone very viral in the market.

There’s another… there’s a lot of other classes of tools there that are, you know, been in market a little bit longer, like the Otters of the world, where those are doing great transcription, but for you to be able to then leverage that context. as part of a flow that’s giving you, assistance on questions you might be getting, objections, and how to handle them, helping you track along the way of how that conversation is going.

You know, those tools are going to give you varying, varying levels of support there, and we’re obviously very proud of, like, what we’ve built with Hero, and how it can… how it can really serve individuals, help them in those moments before, on, and after their And, you know, have great connectivity into all their tools.

Julia Nimchinski:

This is amazing, and thank you for the link, Ryan. We shared it with the community. Super helpful. And last question, Russell, what’s on the roadmap? What are you allowed to share?

Russell Witham:

I mean, the part that I’m most excited about, Julie, I’ve used the word productivity a few times here, and you know, one of the really exciting things in the general market over the last month or so is, for those who have tried Muse, or, you know, one of the, like, dots from OpenAI came out very recently, Grokbot, of course, from from, X.

And… The sort of proactive productivity of those products has been something that we’ve really loved internally in our R&D teams. And so one of the things that we’re working on very next on our side is not just how can Hero act proactively, but also in a very directed and guided sense.

If you’ve experienced one of those products, the way it can really deeply understand, learn about you, be in the way where you’re not ever really teaching Hero about, like, you’re not telling Hero, hey, I want you to learn about this.

It’s just passively picking that up along the way, and that’s very core to a lot of the capabilities we’ve built through time, and we’re excited to push out farther into that and really bring that, you know, massively proactive experience to the product as well. So, that’s a near-term thing that folks can keep an eye out for.

Julia Nimchinski:

Super exciting. Thank you so much.

Russell Witham:

Okay, Julia, thank you. Appreciate it. Take care now.

Julia Nimchinski:

Thanks.