Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Conversica CEO Alex Terry (Part 2)

Alex Terry: It is really outstanding when you look at the change in the last 10 years in terms of how companies and individuals use marketing and sales. The third category we talk about is machine intelligence. That includes the trifecta of technologies that we leverage where we focus on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. We look at that bundle of machine intelligence as the newest and one of the most exciting of those three waves.

In a sense, we think Conversica is surfing off those three important industry trends. We think they’re all pretty exciting. In terms of the specific problems that we solve for our customers, Conversica really addresses two common customer complaints. We hear this all the time. I’m sure you probably hear them as well. We hear marketing organization complain that the sales teams that they work with do not thoroughly follow up on all the leads that the marketing teams generate. A second complaint we hear is that sales teams are complaining that the marketing is generating low-quality leads. There can be a little bit of finger pointing going on in some organizations.

We look at the Conversica Sales Assistant as a way to solve both sets of complaints and really improve the performance of both marketing and sales organizations. You can think about the Conversica AI Sales Assistant as automating and improving the critical hand-off of leads between marketing and sales. We do sit between the marketing and sales organizations. At the top of that sales funnel – right at the hand-off from marketing to sales – we see a big opportunity.

Going back to the industry trends, there has been a lot of time and energy spent on marketing automation and in generating leads and content, syndicating that content, and nurturing large populations of folks.

Also, we’ve seen a lot of investment on sales automation whether it’s customer relationship management. There’s a lot of expertise into what you do with the sales account once you create it and how you manage that. The process where the hand-off from marketing to sales occurs is still a manual process, and it’s error-prone. By automating and improving that process, not only do we make it faster and cheaper but we actually make it better. We can prove that with statistics from our 600 plus customers.

When  I talk about how we help marketing organizations, we do that by making sure that we follow up on every single lead that they generate. This maximizes their ROI and improves the result on their marketing spend, and ensures that no lead is left behind. That’s one of our taglines that we use for sales. It seems to resonate well because some of the marketing folks are pretty frustrated that sales people cherry pick the leads.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Conversica CEO Alex Terry
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