Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Stuart Wall, CEO of Signpost (Part 4)

Stuart Wall: Even prospective employees look for your reviews before making a decision to apply. We think it’s really important. The only way to get a great reputation online is to know who your end customers are and ask them to share their feedback. We think we’re the best solution for that. Regardless of whether someone is using Signpost or another platform, it is something that I would highly recommend to businesses.

Sramana Mitra: How does that through process translate to e-commerce? What percentage of your customers base is e-commerce?

Stuart Wall: That vast majority of our customers have a physical component. E-commerce and B2B have a lot of marketing technology. Those things are hard to use and manual. As a starting point for us, we went after a category that we think is underserved, which is local businesses of all sizes.

Sramana Mitra: What do you see in terms of adoption trends? What is the total number of customers do you have? The category you’re going after is huge. There are millions of these businesses. I’m sure it’s not an easy conversion. They don’t even begin to think like this.

Stuart Wall: Yes. I’ll give you two answers there. A lot of the businesses do care about customer acquisition. They care about revenue, of course as any business owner should. They also understand that reputation matters. They don’t necessarily know how to manage those two things. When we call, we don’t tend to focus on how we do things. It’s on what you can expect. The reality is, by using Mia, you’re going to get far more reviews and revenue that most marketing activities are paying for today, which could be anything from spending money on Google to hiring a marketing intern.

Sramana Mitra: I understand that. The question I’m asking is a slightly bigger trend question. They don’t even know that something like this is possible. You and I know artificial intelligence. These people have no idea that this is even conceivable.

Stuart Wall: Totally. When we talk to them, we don’t use the term AI. If we’re calling a small business in particular, the way we describe is we’re personifying the technology. My view there is that people understand other people. They don’t understand complex technology. One thing I like about Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri is if you look under the hood of those two products, it’s actually pretty complicated, but you address them as you would a person.

When we sell to small business, Mia is a marketing assistant unlike someone you might hire. She’s $300 a month – not $3,000. She never makes a mistake, never takes vacation, keeps a perfect record of your customers, and is at the efficient frontier in terms of getting you reviews and revenue. That makes it easier to understand if you’re a business owner. At some point, we can but we don’t lead with the artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Sramana Mitra: You’re not getting inbound leads. This is all outbound?

Stuart Wall: Yes. In terms of that, we do get a pretty substantial number of inbound leads. There’s a lot of outbound as well. Particularly for things that they don’t necessarily know they need, you definitely have to have an outbound effort. We also have inbound sellers. We do some paid advertising ourselves. Also, all the messages we send have a “Powered by Signpost” footer. You get a meaningful number of inbound from that.

Every business owner is also a consumer. There’s a 10% chance that the business owner got the message from us and from another business. It’s nascent and this is one of the challenges. What we do is we surface for the problems that they have which are generally around advertising or marketing their business, generating new customers, or getting reviews. They’re searching for some of those similar things. We have to educate them about this effortless approach.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Stuart Wall, CEO of Signpost
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