Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Conversica CEO Alex Terry (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I would like to double-click down on that. Walk us through when a lead is being profiled by your engine, what kind of processing is happening? What parameters are being processed and how?

Alex Terry: You mentioned Everstring. There’s a number of different tools that we’re very complementary with. By the way, a number of the companies that we’re talking about are customers of ours and they’re customers of ours. We feel like we’re very complementary. Let me walk you through what an integration looks like and how that hand-off works. For example, for many of our customers, they have some kind of marketing automation system or a lead management system where we integrate with Marketo, Eloqua, or even homegrown email-based systems. Somewhere, a lead gets created and that lead has to get to Conversica somehow. It could be by API or it could be by daily uploads of CSV or flat files or email forwarding. We have a number of different ways that we support in getting a lead into the Conversica system.

Then Conversica integrates with the email system of our customers. If you think about the Conversica AI Sales Assistant, it’s a persona that acts as if it’s an STR or sales assistant in that company. At Conversica, ours is named Rachelle Brooks. If you get an email from Rachelle Brooks, maybe you went to a tradeshow. Rachelle Brooks is going to follow up. She might say, “Hey Sramana, thanks for downloading the white paper. I want to make sure that you get all your questions answered.” She’s going to engage with very simple email questions. She’s not the sales person. She’s just the sales assistant.

Back to the integrations, we get the leads to come in somehow typically through an API like Marketo. Then we integrate with the email system. We then have our persona email back and forth with the lead that came into the system. The third key integration we have is with the CRM of our customer. We support about 28 separate CRMs. We support pretty much every CRM you can think of. If we don’t, we probably will soon. Those integrations are important because as our sales assistant is emailing back and forth with your lead, we’re learning a lot of information. We’re qualifying those leads. We’re figuring out who’s interested.

Sramana Mitra: How is your system doing that?

Alex Terry: It’s literally emailing back and forth with the lead as that persona.

Sramana Mitra: This is all automated?

Alex Terry: Fully automated.

Sramana Mitra: What parameters is that intelligent agent able to correspond on? What kind of signals is it drawing its messaging off?

Alex Terry: For example, we do purchase intent, sentiment analysis, and natural language processing including keyword analysis. We actually look at a number of different vectors to calculate where and how we should respond to any individual message. We have a finite but large number of outbound templates corresponding to all different ways that leads can come into the system, whether it’s in-person visits or filling-out web forms. We’ve over 600 customers. We have a lot of different use cases of how leads have come into the system. We customize the outreach but, usually, there’s some kind of connection. There’s something that you can leverage. It’s not typically a cold email. The lead has expressed an interest in one way or another in the company or the product. We leverage that to kick off the conversation.

From there, part of the strength of our system is in the interpreting of the response. There’re a lot of systems that use templates to send out messages. By the way, we can all tell when you’re getting one of those letters. The emails that you get from Conversica, you’d really think that they’re from a person. I’ve a lot of stats. I can tell you why I’m pretty sure about that. You get an email that you think is from an assistant maybe or a business development assistant. Then you respond naturally. Maybe you’re interested or not interested. Typically, people don’t respond the first time. The sales assistant will follow up on a particular cadence that’s customized for each vertical and each customer. Basically, the sales assistant is trying to get an answer to one question, “Are you interested or not?” If you’re not interested, that’s fine but if you are interested, we’ll get you on the phone with an actual sales expert from that company. The sales assistant’s job is not to sell you. It’s to sift you into either interested or not interested buckets.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Conversica CEO Alex Terry
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