More Power to Sales

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Julia Nimchinski: So excited for this. Finally, Gerard Clay.

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Julia Nimchinski: we’ve made it. It’s not bad.

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Clay Killgore: Happy to be here.

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Jarod Greene: Yeah, you’re ready to cook. I got promoted Julia, so I’m excited to be here, too.

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Julia Nimchinski: Let’s do it.

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Jarod Greene: Let’s cook all right. Clay’s gonna share screens. I’m gonna get some pretext. And then Clay’s gonna dive right into a demo, because I noticed you all came to see. So

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Jarod Greene: screens up. It allows us to set context. You guys have probably seen a numbers play like this before. But what you’re seeing here is that we know sales reps, spend about 70% of their time on non selling tasks. That’s email crm updates, meetings that’s from our friends at Salesforce. Now, here’s the rub. When they actually are selling

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Jarod Greene: only about 60 or 60% of those deals end in no decision. That’s not losing to the competition that’s losing to status quo. We fail to drive urgency. We fail to connect with buyers on what they need and why they need it.

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Jarod Greene: And it all kind of results in that last number we don’t want, which is that we’re seeing only 41% of reps hit quota last year. That’s from our friends at rep view, but it’s there. Only half of our teams are performing over half are underperforming. It’s no mystery why, it seems that they’re bogged down, flying blind and stretched really thin. So if you go to the next slide to see what we did about it, we recognize that Vivin’s roots have been in sales engineering.

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Jarod Greene: And if you know sales engineers, you know, they typically get involved in the middle of the cycle. So they get involved in everything from the post 1st kind of meeting, the 1st discovery meeting

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Jarod Greene: all the way to close one, and an increasing role in the adoption and deployment on the post sales side. So we know a thing or 2 about the middle, and what we found is that reps are spending a lot of time on these kinds of deliverables you see on the slide. These are the things that are difficult to produce at scale, particularly when they’re using 1012, 15 different Rev. Tech tools.

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Jarod Greene: This is messy, this is labor intensive. What we found is that this is inconsistent across the board. Not every rep or every team does these things the exact same way. And so, while reps are spending times pulling things together, chasing follow ups, manually writing these proposals. It’s slow, it’s error prone, and it’s super repetitive. Shouldn’t AI solve for all this? Well, we think so. So if you go to the next slide.

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Jarod Greene: This is from our friends at winning by design. This is the Bowtie model, and if you think about where these deliverables matter the most, it’s that messy middle we had talked about. It’s everything. From the moment where the prospect says I’m committed I’m prioritizing this pursuit.

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Jarod Greene: I’m ready to work with you to see if you can offer me things that your competitor can’t, and it extends well beyond the deal, being signed initially into onboarding deployment, renewal and expansion. We know that if we can get these deliverables right in the messy middle. It accelerates the entire sales cycle. That means shorter sales, cycles. That means better productivity from the reps. It means happier customers and better deployments.

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Jarod Greene: So that’s why we launched Ava and Ava is the next slide. That’s our AI sales agent. Now, this is giving teams as much as 20 h per opportunity back by doing some of that dirty work of b 2 b sales that we had talked about, so that your reps can win larger deals faster. Now, here’s what’s really key, because I want to show you better than I can tell you. But I think it’s important to set this pretext. Ava is not a Chatbot all right. Instead of just prompted a Chatbot.

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Jarod Greene: We’re doing a lot of things you’ve talked about throughout the day on the left side. You are seeing what truly makes an expert. So we vivid have had the luxury of working with some of the best b 2 b sales teams on the planet. For the last 5 years we’ve extracted their expertise on what the best sellers do. So it’s the time they spend. It’s the certification. It’s the training, it’s the networking. It’s everything they’ve learned to be an expert is what we’ve codified as far as Ava’s brain is concerned.

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Jarod Greene: and that would be cool if we stopped there. But we didn’t. We also knew that she needs to understand your products, your processes, your people, and your platforms. And so we take context from those things. And we make the second part of what makes Ava great. And because Ava has an expert sales mindset and knowledge of your people, process and platforms.

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Jarod Greene: she can proactively create these accelerators. These are the deliverables that we had talked about, that are always AI generated, that are proactively delivered and contextually aware. So again, Clay can show you better than I can tell you. So I’m going to pass the mic to him to do just that.

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Clay Killgore: Thanks, Gerard, yeah. And just to set the stage before we log in, I’m actually going to assume a new role today like Gerard, I got promoted as well from my typical se duties. I’m going to take the role of a commercial ae, where I’m working in a high volume segment managing 40 plus deals. I don’t have a dedicated se, and you can imagine how messy that middle really is when it comes to managing my time and delivering a quality, buying experience.

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Clay Killgore: Well, with Ava at my side at every engagement. 24, 7. That is no longer a challenge, because Ava is now able to sit in, listen, and proactively do all of the work for me.

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Clay Killgore: And so now, in order to show you how Ava is able to do that work for me. Let’s go ahead and log in.

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Clay Killgore: And so right off the bat. How Ava makes all this possible, like Gerard just stated, is that she naturally just fits in to all the tools that we’re already using.

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Clay Killgore: So when logging in, I’m actually authenticating with salesforce, so that it brings in all of my own accounts and opportunities, and breaks them out into deal spaces, where I can collaborate with Ava and pull in all of that rich context from Salesforce Crm related to the opportunities, the accounts, and the contacts. And Crm is a great source of data. But we know that there’s a lot of things that fall through the cracks and never make it in there.

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Clay Killgore: So in order to provide that 360 degree coverage, Ava is also plugging into all the tools that we use to engage with our buyers and prospects and customers like calendar email call recording like gong, because all of those tools contain a wealth of information, insights and deal context that’s going to be key for us in order to bring into Ava

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Clay Killgore: and combine with her brain to really help us drive the deal forward without needing to pull in that dedicated technical resource, because Ava is always on.

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Clay Killgore: and when powering that brain. What that looks like is when you bring Ava into your organization, you onboard her just like you would a new sales hire. You give her all of the ramp documents you give her a documentation on your products, processes, competitors, a wealth of information that Ava will naturally ingest

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Clay Killgore: store within that brain, and everyone else in the field gets to take advantage of that knowledge and really allows all those interactions and those accelerators to be grounded in your stuff and really formatted in the way that a top performing seller would create these things.

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Mary Shea: you know, what kind of AI tools are you experimenting with right now? And I’d love to go through everyone and and get a bunch of tools out there.

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Clay Killgore: And so now that Ava’s been trained, you’ve seen how I’m able to plug into all these data sources. I now want to jump in to an example deal space of an opportunity that we recently closed one. And now we’ve got them implemented and live as a customer.

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Clay Killgore: So I’m jumping within the sky crate deal space, and you can see just at a glance the wealth of context that’s within here all of my upcoming meetings from the calendar, plus all of my past conversations over years and years of context that would just simply never work within a General Llm project due to maxing out that context window.

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Clay Killgore: So when you think about from initial acquisition all the way into renewal and expansion, you’re going to have that continuity, and none of these insights are ever going to be lost.

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Clay Killgore: And for myself as a seller, what I really like about being able to jump into these calendar briefs, or any of those call recording summaries is that with gong they do a really great job of summarizing the transcript itself, breaking out the key insights, questions, and things like that. But gong has no knowledge of our products. Our processes doesn’t know where the bodies are hidden that could cause the deal to blow up.

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Clay Killgore: because Ava has that knowledge. Now, these briefs are going to look a lot more tailored to that of a seller persona, where, instead of it just being a broad summarization of the transcript. It’s actually going to try to drive action items. Set the agenda based off your sales process and help me get up to speed, even if I’m still ramping up on the overall sales process and products.

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Clay Killgore: And then, like Gerard mentioned

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Clay Killgore: Ava actually doing the work and what we call accelerators. These are the things that we do on every single deal. A lot of us. You on the call probably recognize these and probably think about how much time it actually takes to do these things.

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Clay Killgore: These are the things that Ava is constantly creating. It’s a living, breathing document that’s sitting there in the background and will continue to grow as we have more engagement as we bring in more context.

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Clay Killgore: And of course, Gerard mentioned, we’re not a chat bot tool. We do have the ability to come in and prompt Ava and actually ask product specific questions things that maybe we don’t know, without a dedicated se to come in and help

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Clay Killgore: and there we go. Got a great answer there. So sorry about that. But let’s go ahead and actually ignore prompting. Because in our words, if we’re forcing sellers to have to come in here and be prompt engineers and have to do these super complex queries. Then we’re simply not doing our job. And so what I really want to focus on is 2 key accelerators that I think everyone on the call is familiar with

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Clay Killgore: really thinking about it from the acquisition phase of the bow tie. How do we drive that consensus?

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Clay Killgore: How do we actually know what stakeholders that we’ve talked to over all of those years of past calls. Think about in the past world where I’d have to go through my notes. Go on Linkedin. Go watch, call recordings, and just try to put this huge puzzle together because Ava’s listening in. And she’s trained to do this. She’s now going to tell us what stakeholders we have engaged with.

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Clay Killgore: which stakeholders we need to engage with, based off her listening in on those transcripts, hearing any of those stakeholder names that maybe we haven’t had on a call, and she’s gonna break out a rich profile that we could never do as a human ourselves, even if we spent a full week trying to build this out.

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Clay Killgore: So Ava is going to naturally understand what’s their role, what’s their sentiment? What are the pain points and goals that they’re trying to challenge. Who do they report to, and also provide us with several different graphics and visuals to help us understand who reports to who who do? We need to check off the list?

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Clay Killgore: And what does actually not getting one of these buyers aligned and getting them one over? How does that impact our deal process? Because we know who are those key stakeholders? We have to check off before we get to the next stage. And what are those specific risk

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Clay Killgore: that are actually floating up tied to each of these? Just to ensure that when we get to the end of the sales cycle. Get into this forecast calls. We know exactly who we need to go reach out to how we need to close this deal, and nothing gets lost and slipped through the cracks that may never make it within Crm.

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Clay Killgore: And so

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Clay Killgore: all of this is super critical for the initial acquisition. But you think about getting already to the end of the deal. How do we set them up for a successful implementation? We’re not waiting till the end of the deal to get out the template and start populating this with all the notes and things that we’ve forgotten from calls that we had months ago.

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Clay Killgore: Ava is once again already building out this post sales handoff document even from those 1st initial calls where she’s helping the post sales team understand the sales engagement summary, who we talked to? Who are those key contacts that we’ve identified, that are going to be critical for implementation.

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Clay Killgore: She’s also gonna understand what is the implementation, timeline and plan. We’ve actually trained her on how we go live. She’s listening in on the transcripts and giving us something that we can present back to the client, live on a call helping them understand? Here’s the process. Here’s the key. Milestones

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Clay Killgore: as well as the key challenges that came up on the initial sales. Call that often never makes it into those deal handoff templates. So now we’re able to see. Hey, what are the challenges and goals they’re trying to solve with our product.

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Clay Killgore: What are the use? Cases that are top of mind, that we need to roll it out in a phased approach? And then what are the actual gaps and feature requests that came up related to any of our product offerings. And is this a deal breaker, or is this just a nice to have. These are the things that constantly cause go lives to blow up. It causes churn. And it’s just so hard to capture this because we don’t have Ava sitting there listening in and reading on every single engagement.

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Clay Killgore: So all of this helps us set them up for additional renewal and expansion. All of this context will remain within this space as we continue to drive more opportunities. And this is what allows us to just really transform our selling motion where I can now give white glove service to all of my deals, just like I would if I was an enterprise or a strat rep.

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Clay Killgore: Ava’s doing all the manual work for me. I’ve got more time to now get in front of customers. I’m able to ramp up. I’m able to jump to that next level for my career, and this allows everyone else on my team to have the same consistent messaging as well as just the same overall process instilled so that we’re all on the same page.

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Clay Killgore: So after using Ava for just a couple of weeks, I honestly can’t imagine to going back to the old way of doing things. And this is really just getting started where we expect these accelerators to continue to grow, where we’re going to introduce new ones as well as more integrations to figure out how we can pull in even more context

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Clay Killgore: to give you and the team better insights. And so this was just a very quick preview. I could obviously keep going. I do want to remain conscious of time, as I know. We’ve got about 2 min left, but did want to pause here if there were any questions, and then I’ll hand it back over to you. Gerard.

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Julia Nimchinski: This is amazing. Let’s address a couple of questions from the audience. One of them is, how do you ensure sales engineers actually using the platform versus defaulting to slack and spreadsheets.

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Jarod Greene: That’s a good one for clay.

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Clay Killgore: How do you? I’m so. Can you repeat that one more time? I missed the last piece.

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Julia Nimchinski: Yeah, how do you actually ensure adoption?

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Clay Killgore: How do you ensure adoption? I think it’s just the fact that it’s really no huge change management. It’s already all the tools that I’m using today. Ava’s trained on all the processes that myself and my selling team already does. So it’s very little about me having to be a great, prompt engineer have to really change the way that I work. It’s simply just done by plugging it in doing my job as a rep and getting the calls on the getting the calls on the calendar. And Ava really just does the rest in the background.

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Jarod Greene: It also assumes that you know Ava’s not the Q. And a. So you don’t go to slack and ask a question and wait for an answer. Slack’s not gonna proactively generate any of the materials. Clay Walkthrough. And so I think, once sales reps. See that I have the deliverables and materials I need without asking. I don’t think they ever go back to slack again, but happy to engage and follow up if there’s a deeper question behind the adoption to to address.

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Julia Nimchinski: Thanks, rod and clay. The next question is more about differentiation. So what differentiates Vivin from other AI sales solutions.

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Jarod Greene: Yeah, great question. I’d say there’s 3 at the big level. We talked about agent intelligence as our framework to create the agent that starts with the brain right? It is modeled after the expertise of some of the best sellers on the planet that we’ve been working with for the last 5 years, every opportunity, every record, every lead, every persona. So it’s the brain and the expertise. This one component.

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Jarod Greene: The other component, I’d say, is the context, how do we bring all that context together to make it make sense? So that expert has a context to work through? And I’d say, the 3rd is the notion of again proactive work products. You don’t see other agents proactively generating the materials. We just showed you a lot of times if you prompt enough, and you prompt the right way, you might get something close. But remember that the deliverables we get or give

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Jarod Greene: are based on an expert based on your product processes and platforms, and given to you without having to ask or be a prompt engineer. So I say, those are the big 3 differentiators for ava versus other AI. Agents in the market.

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Julia Nimchinski: Super helpful. And does Vivin help with resource allocation across regions or product lines.

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Jarod Greene: Does it, Clay? It’s a question on resource, allocation across regions and product lines. Can you help me.

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Clay Killgore: Yeah, I mean, we don’t have necessarily like a resource allocation workflow in Ava. But the goal is that with those resources you should be able to now make that less of an issue, because you’re saving them so much time, allowing them to do more with less to where they can actually take on that high volume with the actual resource assignments being less of a concern because you’ve got an always on dedicated support resource there at your fingertips at any given moment.

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Clay Killgore: So that’s where we see kind of the breakthrough there is that instead of worrying about how to, you know, necessarily play calendars, make sure the right people are in the right place. We’re allowing a lot more of the reps to be able to handle a lot more of the burden on their own, because they’ve got Ava sitting there at their side without having to necessarily wait for that resource to come in to answer a question or support them with like a demo or something else on the call. So that’s the way that I would frame it as how is Ava helps? With that challenge.

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Julia Nimchinski: Awesome. And let’s address one last one. What’s the typical time to value? Once a team rolls it out.

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Jarod Greene: It’s not a marketing sales line for me to say immediately, but it really is immediate, I mean honestly, you saw Clay walk through what it means to train Ava. And again, if you have a process to onboard, if you don’t have a process on board, what do you want, Ava, to know that she can’t already figure out from your website that she can’t figure out through Q&A, and the minute you start to ingest that context, you get value and output, so I don’t want it to sound like a cheat.

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Jarod Greene: Easy market and sales line to say immediate. But we have not been proven wrong on that immediate time to value so far.

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Clay Killgore: Agreed.

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Julia Nimchinski: Thank you, Gerard and Clay. What is the best next step.

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Jarod Greene: I would strongly recommend anyone who wants to learn more about Ava to go to vivid.com backslash resources. You’ll get a few things we put together a sales guide for gentic AI. What it is, what it isn’t. We put together an ebook that walks through all the accelerators that are in the platform. And if for anyone who’s curious on that scary agent Intelligence Graphic, I showed, there’s a technical white paper to break it down. If you don’t want to read any of this. Just request a meeting and a demo, and we’ll be happy to show it to you. With the context. You probably need.

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Julia Nimchinski: And that wraps up day one of the agenda Ki Summit. Thank you so much for everyone who’s watching. Thank you for the incredible speakers, sponsors.

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Julia Nimchinski: panelists, demo leaders, and we are back tomorrow at 8 30 am. Pacific.

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Julia Nimchinski: And yeah, by the way, you can book a 1 on one session with almost all of our speakers. We are building the stock market of scales here, so lots of exciting news from Hsc. As well, and see you tomorrow.