Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Conversica CEO Alex Terry (Part 4)

Alex Tery: The way it’s doing it is, it is literally doing the natural language processing of all the inbound communication. You would be astounded what people will tell the assistant. They’ll tell the assistant way more information than they would tell the salesperson. Everything that the AI persona learns in those email interactions is stored in the CRM. The sales assistant is updating the CRM and the actual sales people at every step of the way. For example, we have a number of different ways that we can alert the sales people by sending an email, digest, or sending a text message. The point is the sales people are 100% in the loop. They’re comfortable that the sales assistant would operate like a regular assistant would. The sales assistant’s job is not to replace the sales person. It’s to augment the sales person and make their lives easier.

Sramana Mitra: You said you have about a hundred customers?

Alex Terry: 600 plus paying customers. That’s about 10,000 paying sales people.

Sramana Mitra: Segment these customers for me. Are there specific industry segments or specific types of products they’re selling? Help me understand your customer base where this is getting adoption.

Alex Terry: The company was started by focusing on one vertical, which is automotive. We focused on new car dealerships. At this point, we have over a dozen verticals but the big four for us, so far, are automotive, technology – it’s the second largest and the fastest-growing – for-profit education, and financial services. We’ve got a mix of B2B and B2C verticals.

Sramana Mitra: My gut, knowing about this business, is that it would be a lot easier to do B2C qualifications for car dealerships or mortgage than it would be to do high-tech enterprise sales. Is that an accurate statement?

Alex Terry: I can understand the gut reaction but it’s actually very much the same problem from a technology perspective. For example, we’re a software company. Our typical customer in the B2B segment gets 500 to 1,500 inbound leads a month. By the way, the typical automotive customer gets between 300 and 700 leads a month.

Whether your leads are a person looking for a car or a person shopping for an anti-virus software or some kind of software, the process is really very similar where the first level of person that you interact with in the organization is often not the senior sales person. It’s someone who’s trying to qualify you. You get all kinds of inbound requests. It could be kids doing research for a paper. You have a lot of stuff coming in and you don’t want your salespeople spending their time and energy on unqualified opportunities. There’s typically some filter. There’s a number of qualifying questions. Automating that process is just as beneficial for a B2B company as it is for a B2C company.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Conversica CEO Alex Terry
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