Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Canice Lambe, CTO of TAS Group (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is this primarily applicable to enterprise selling? You started off by saying it has a complex sales cycle, so it sounds like you’re dealing mostly with complex enterprise deals. Is that correct?

Canice Lambe: Yes, that’s correct. Forester recently came out with a report on B2B sales that has a really nice diagram on it. It talks about how if you have a solution that could be either simple or complex, we serve the quadrant where the buying environment is complex and the solution type is complex. What Forester is predicting is that it is the only sector that will grow over the next five years or so.

In general, the title of the report was suggesting that there will be a million less sales professionals because at the other end of the spectrum where it’s a relatively simple buying environment and solution, a lot of automation can kick in. It becomes more of a self-service than requiring a salesperson on the other end to take your order. We’re working at the high-end where there’s a complex buying environment, a long sales cycle involving multiple buyers, and equally a complex solution type where being able to articulate the value of what you are solving is a non-trivial task.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me a little bit about your company. Where are you based? Is this a self-financed company? What are the specifics of the company itself?

Canice Lambe: The company has been around for almost 10 years, but along the way, it actually purchased a business unit from Oracle. This 25-year-old methodology I referred to earlier was originally its own independent company, which in turn was bought by Siebel, which was bought by Oracle. Oracle put that sales training IP for sale because it didn’t really want to be in that business. At the same time, our CEO had founded a tech company to embed sales methodology into software. There was a perfect fit there. Technology plus methodology was a great combination.

The company is actually privately-funded. We have taken on funding but it’s private as opposed to institutional. We are headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. That’s where the product development and engineering is based. Most of our customers are based in the US, but we also have customers in India and also Australia and a couple of other places. We have a direct sales model for our big customers. We also have agents who sell to the smaller deals.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Canice Lambe, CTO of TAS Group
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