How To Never Do Sales Admin Work Again

Welcome to The Did You Know Podcast by Varisource, where we interview founders, executives and experts at amazing technology companies that can help your business save a lot of time, money and grow faster. Especially bring awareness to smarter, better, faster solutions that can transform your business and give you a competitive advantage----https://www.varisource.com

Transcript

Welcome to the did you know Podcast by Varisource, where we interview founders and executives at amazing technology companies that can help your business save time and money, and grow. Especially bring awareness to smarter, better, faster solutions that can transform your business. 1.4s Hello, everyone. 

This is Victor with varisource. Welcome to another episode of the Did You Know? Podcast. Today I'm excited to have Sybill with us, who is one of our newest partners. But I'm super excited because I'm actually an avid user of the platform myself, and so I can truly attest that. It's an amazing service and platform, but we're excited to have Ben Sternsmith with us. He's the Chief Revenue officer. And for those of you that are not familiar with civil, they're a generative AI for salespeople, and their goal is to eliminate non revenue generating activities. And those are very bold statements, but super excited to talk all about it. Ben. 1.3s

U1

Awesome. Great to be here, Victor. Thank you for having me. Yeah, 

U2

we have tons of questions. Again, AI is big. Obviously, if you tell any salesperson on Earth you're going to help them with non revenue generating activities, I think they're all going to love you and they should. But yeah, if you don't mind, maybe if you can give the audience a little bit of background of yourself and yeah, 

U1

be great. Awesome. Yeah. So Sybil was started about three years ago, it was a project out of Stanford. Both of our co founders gorgeous initiate were lecturing there and the pandemic know. And all of a sudden, they were looking at a bunch of zoom boxes like the rest of us. And they really had a frustration. Decided to build a platform that would help them clue into what their audience was really doing, whether they were paying attention or not. To the lecture. And that's kind of where Sybil was born. So we started as a conversational intelligence platform and have really evolved into a platform to help sales and CSMS actually MVPs of sales. The leadership within that whole chain 1.1s eliminate non revenue generating activities by just automating a lot of things in the customer process that are hard to do, like record the call, summarize the call, write a follow up email, append salesforce or CRM. We do a little bit of all of that to help just speed things along and give everybody more value back and more time back. 1s And you asked a little bit about me. I've been a revenue leader for almost 25 years now. I've worked all over the valley from big companies like Salesforce and Oracle and Know, got into startups in the Lyft IPO. I ran sales at Lyft Business and then ended up going really early stage know series C and Series B and Series A and now seed stage here at Sybil to really work back at my roots, which is working with revenue leaders and helping them really automate their business and add value. 1.9s Yeah. So I want to kind of do like a crawl walk run progression towards that ultimate goal of that generate know, helping salespeople conversation. But really how it started out with, know, kind of us discovering you guys and also looking at different solutions is 1.3s we all get on a lot of Zoom meetings, teams meetings, Google meetings, just a lot virtual meeting, let's call it. And this conversation or meeting recording tool has been around for the or at least popularized in the last two, three years. There's a ton of different plugins and tools that record calls, but 1.1s

U2

I can't explain it, but it was never right. It was never enough. It was only doing specific things, 2.9s I guess, starting off kind of that cross conversation. So why has the call recording why is it not enough, you think? Being a revenue leader for so many years, why do you think the call recording is simply not 

U1

enough? Yeah, I think. 1.6s We have all, since the Pandemic had the same experience all at once, everyone was forced into, at least in some capacity, recording calls. And a lot of companies, especially in tech, really haven't ever recovered. They just are so used to it that they prefer to have a distributed sales team and customer base as well, that they're recording calls every day with. And it is if you can do it well, it becomes a really efficient way to work because you can have eight to ten calls in a day versus flying on airplanes and meeting maybe just one or two customers in that day. But since then, we've all been recording a lot of these videos, right? Because recording a call is infinitely better than taking live notes on a call and then forgetting, right? So that's where everybody I think from a base level, people have been doing that pretty consistently. But now the problem is we all have video pile up, right? And no one has enough time in the day to hold an hour meeting, review that hour meeting again, and do all the other things that are required in life, from work to family time, right, to vacations. So what you end up getting is you get a lot of video that's being recorded and not ever reviewed again. And so 1.3s we're now at the point with artificial intelligence, we use a lot of large language models to help us, most importantly GPT Four, we're an OpenAI customer of their enterprise API, and we prompt it in all these amazing ways to get out a really efficient and useful output from every single meeting. So it's like, I don't really want to watch the call again, but I sure would like a summary, and I would sure like if you wrote my follow up for me with all the next steps, wouldn't that be something that I have to do, but maybe don't want to do? And I don't want to do it eight times because I had eight calls today. I want to go home and hang out with my family. So Sybil is sort of in the middle there where we can record a call with our platform, we summarize it and then we help automate those follow ups and other things like CRM append that are just time consuming, that really no one likes doing, but we need to do because that's part of our job. So it doesn't really matter what platform you use. You can use Zoom, you can use Teams, you can use Google Meet. We work with all of those and we also work with some of the larger providers in the space, like Gong and Chorus, that a lot of people have already invested in. You can take those calls and turn a lot of those downstream automation like summaries and email follow ups and CRM updates. All those can happen too, from some of those providers. So you don't need to run us in order to get value. We kind of can offer you value if you have nothing. Go full platform. Or it can offer you value if you have other incumbent providers that you're looking to enhance. 1.6s

U2

Yeah, again, that is super smart when I saw you guys doing that, because to me, maybe they're a little bit of competition, but yet you found a way to coexist and still provide value on top of market incumbents. I think, first of all, just a smart move on your side. So I want to start off with another kind of basic question because it sounds so simple, especially for you. You understand all the tools, know how to leverage all the technology, but for the majority of the market out there, we work with a lot of startups, we work with a lot of business owners, and obviously they all sell, right? In any business, everybody's a salesperson to some degree, but they're still not even leveraging. I would say still a majority. A big part of the market and companies are having calls but not doing any recording at all, where they're just taking notes, like on notepads. Or worse than that is they're not even taking any notes. They're just hoping to remember what they wrote down or wrote in an email summarizing in a couple of bullet points. Right. Those things are actually still the majority. Are you surprised to see that? Let alone using your Tour, any tool at all? They're not even using any tools. They're just having calls and not even kind of recording these calls. Is that shocking to you? But I also see that as tremendous opportunity for service like yours. 1.2s

U1

Yeah, it's not a surprise. If you really look at the data, 1.1s 80% of the market actually a little bit higher than 80%, don't run any conversational intelligence tool in the enterprise. They just don't record calls. 1.1s And so there's a huge opportunity for everybody to embrace this technology, use it. It's probably the best time ever to embrace it. Net New because if you use something like Sybil, you don't have to inherit the previous video debt that a lot of these companies have piled up. We talked about earlier, the video pile up, you sort of have a way to use conversational intelligence in a really meaningful way, meaning it's immediately value add. It's taking notes for you so you can actually be more human and focus on the customer, which taking notes, if you have done that for years, like I have, is really kind of you're multitasking, you're kind of listening, but you're writing notes down so you're not really hearing what the customer is saying at all. Parts in the call because you're doing multiple things. Or maybe you're running the demo and trying to take notes and ask questions and be personable. Being a sales rep is hard these days. It doesn't have to be that hard with Sybil. You can just hold the call and you have a little AI notetaker on your shoulder listening to every single thing that's being said. It's transcribing it beautifully. It's turning into what we call a magic summary at the end of the call. So you have all of their pain points, all of their interest areas, even little bits of small talk that they talk about, like oh, I just got back from vacation from the 4 July with my family and I was up in Napa and I had a great time. Sybil will listen for those things and persist them to even salesforce. 1.4s They're obviously emailable to other people. You can send video clips of that to your colleagues, but just makes it very easy to be an attentive Salesperson or attentive CSM and really listen to what your customer is asking of you. And I think that translates to better outcomes for both sides. 1.4s

U2

Yeah, I was going to ask you to kind of define conversational AI for maybe 1.3s a lot of people that may not be familiar with that term, but I think you just did a great job there explaining. I think it's more than like you said, because I've seen where there's a lot sometimes recording videos is better than doing notepads and doing nothing, right? So it's like, yeah, record a bunch of video, you can watch it later and that makes sense, right? But once you record it, a lot of videos, how do you actually read through and actually how do you actually go through all those videos which are 30 minutes an hour long and try to find the tidbits and then you still have to write down those things. And that's where I think what you guys have done is truly tremendous and smart and it's really leveraging AI to transcribe the call so you can have the summary of the text, but then also the video to rewatch later if needed. But okay, let's kind of walk to kind of this. So we've gone through kind of the crawl, right, the basics. And now let's go to the walk. So 1.4s as a again revenue leader for the last 20 plus years, what do you think is the challenge with current flows for SDRs and sales team? And why is it so time consuming? Why is so much time wasted and focus wasted there? 2.3s

U1

Between SDRs and AES, for instance, or the whole value chain? 

U2

The whole value chain. 

U1

I think it comes down to a few things. It's really listening and notetaking of what the customer is saying, even at first touch. So let's say your SDR team cold calls somebody and it's a good cold call. They extract all the bants and things that everybody tries to get on one of those calls. And let's say it goes swimmingly, right? I, as a customer, am telling your SDR about my business. And that is captured in, I would say, a very inconsistent way. Some SDRs are great notetakers, some are not so great notetakers. Imagine if you had 1.2s not only recording but a summary of that interaction that you could pass to an Ae with the deal pass. So the next step is to pipe an opportunity, right? Then flip it. And then the Ae gets on their call with the prospect. And then usually the prospect ends up repeating themselves a ton, right? Because the same questions are asked about how said service matches their business and their pain. And there really is a better way because with Sybil you can basically record that call, pass a summary to that Ae and have them objectively view the words that were said by the prospect, 1.9s understood by a large language model like OpenAI, is infinitely more objective than any human's interpretation of what was said. Does that make sense? It's a totally different way of thinking of it, but it's much more efficient because the BDR doesn't have to spend time typing notes. Those are just automatically sent to the Ae. And the Ae can really trust every time that what they're looking at is not like it's not a version of the truth. It is what was said. And that is 1.3s low calorie and very efficient and hopefully better for both the customer and the organization receiving that lead. 1s Does that make sense? Yeah, 

U2

that 100% makes sense. I love that. So maybe if you expand a little bit on the Ae side. Now what about that value chain for the Ae 

U1

side? Yeah, so that Ae gets tremendous value on the objective lead pass. Okay. And this is assuming both the SDR BDR and the Ae are on the Sybil platform or one of the platforms like Gong, of course, that we work with. But assuming that's the case and all calls are being recorded, summarized, and passed, the Ae gets tremendous value too, in all stages of the sales cycle. So there are various things that we need to know, various exit criteria that every single stage in something like a salesforce is defined as. And the Ae is expertly going through that process. And so we are summarizing each of those client interactions. We're even rationalizing emails that they're sending back and forth because we can integrate to salesforce or HubSpot, read those emails, incorporate them into the layered amount of calls that they're having with the client, and then actually turning that into what we call a deal sync. And this is a brand new product, Victor. I don't think I've even showed you. We have a new product called Deal Sync that basically appends CRM fields and summarizes the client interaction across multiple calls and emails. But it's all one continuum, right? My interaction as a customer with my vendors is a long term thing. It's the initial touch, but it's all the way through that sales cycle. And that sales cycle could be nine months, right? What am I telling you? What are you ingesting as an organization and what are you doing with it? Sybil can help turn that into really reportable structured information in CRM. And that is really what we're most excited about these days with the new dealsync product. 1.3s Yeah, again, 1.2s

U2

I love to see that as well, but when you kind of mentioned it earlier, I kind of already thought kind of how this would work, and it just makes a lot of sense. I love, obviously, the engineering expertise you guys have, but also just on the business side, 1s these are the things that people usually would look for, right? So it makes a lot of sense. I love it. One of the, I would say, or a trillion dollar question here is transcription the accuracy? Because I've seen tools where anytime you transcribe AI is not perfect, right. 1.3s Obviously, as you're providing a lot of summaries and content and intent and those type of things, obviously the user has to be able to trust or know that, hey, the content is accurate, 1.5s so the accuracy of transcription and the summary is a challenge, and how do you guys differentiate or solve that versus maybe others you 

U1

think? Well, we obsess over it. So it's a really good point. None of what I just described, actually, this whole call is predicated on really good transcription, because if you can't turn the spoken word into the written or readable word accurately, you're actually going to summarize it inaccurately, and you're not going to really have a good representation of what was actually talked about. So it's really important, and you're right, some providers are better at it than others, and we have obsessed over expert transcription. We have a myriad of different providers that we work with, including some organic code that we've written to really get that dialed in. And so our customers have told us we've been selected often because our transcription is so accurate across we're English only today but accents we have a lot of international customers and they've selected us in these bake offs that they do because we do well with accents and we transcribe well and we have different things you can add in the platform for custom vocabulary that is jargon maybe in your business and other things 1.1s know, improve that transcription and make it more custom to your business over time. Sybil is set up to really adapt to those things and does it really well. 1.5s

U2

It. Yeah. No, I love that. I definitely see that with you guys as well. The quality has just been amazing. And really, all of that just takes more than capability, really. It takes so much time. It's the little things, right? Like, where before I had to do certain notes or take certain notes or worry about okay, writing a follow up email. All those little things take up a lot of time. And even if there's no civil exists in the world, you would still have to do those things, because if you don't, you're not going to be successful. Right. So I think it's a huge time save, at least for me. But also, that's why I'm so passionate about partnering with you guys. 2s Actually, one of the follow up questions we were going to go over is why and how do you guys integrate with CRM and to create more value? And obviously you've already talked about the CRM aspect. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the Slack integration and how does that kind of work and how does that provide value or ROI 

U1

to the user? 1.4s Awesome. Yeah, I appreciate you asking. 1.2s One thing that I did not touch on yet is our workflow. So one of the things that makes Sybil really pretty magical is not only you hold a call, you don't have to take notes. It takes notes for you. It gives you a summary. If you weren't on the call to read what happens, you can choose to listen to it or not. And then it also writes a follow up email for you to your customer, really with some next steps in. And if you read them, it looks like a human wrote them, right? Those are all delivered in. So we, after every call, we provide a post to email, we provide a post to salesforce or HubSpot, and we also 1.1s provide a Slack post. And slack, if you're a Slack shop and most of our customers really embrace Slack, including us, we give you a lot of customizability of how that slack group looks. So we have some larger customers with many, many different teams, and they want to see their team's meeting summaries so they can share and learn from each other, but they don't necessarily want to see the whole company's 2.2s meeting summaries. And so we're able to segregate those and kind of serve it up to your team right where they're working so they don't have to really learn a new tool because they already know Slack. But also, it's very 1.3s specific to the team receiving it because it's in the right group. 1.2s Hopefully that makes sense. It's a little bit better visually, but just know that it's in workflow, it's convenient, and we give your team lots of different ways to work. Now, if you have an email based team and you're like, hey, I don't run Slack, how does this apply to me? Email is a great way to consume civil summaries as well, and you can interact with them right there or in the, 1.5s you know, so lots of different choices there by way of workflow. 1.4s Yeah. 

U2

And I think through these conversations, we want to pique people's interest. And I think everything you just talked about is going to make people want to have demo with you guys and check out how this works. And that's where they're going to see how the workflow the magic happens. 2.4s I think one of 2s the biggest, differentiators, at least when I first met you and you showed me the demo of the platform was kind of the body language, reading the body language, meaning you guys have the capability to obviously scan through, let's say, the recording, the video recording, check the body language and even talk about how long somebody talked. All right, hey, Victor talked for 20% or Victor talked for 80%. Maybe Victor needs to talk less next time. Right. But some of these things are critical for salespeople and their management, their executives, but also the body language part. I know that was kind of a specialty of your founders technical capability. Can you kind of talk through that whole purpose and differentiator and how that works and why that 

U1

matters? It. Yeah, it's a really unique feature of our platform, really on the conversational intelligence side. So if you run the whole civil platform and you're recording calls using Sybil, we are able to pick up on the nonverbal cues that your prospects are giving off. And humans give off a lot of nonverbal cues, well over 30, and arguably, and studies have shown this, well over 90% of what we're trying to communicate is through body language or nonverbal communication. So wouldn't you love to pick up on that on a video call? Now, this is really difficult to do. We only pick up on seven of the 30 plus that humans give off. But those seven are things like smiles, nods, head shaking the other way, frowning. We do some really interesting things with gaze patterns. We can tell if people are reading, like, another screen. Like, if I'm presenting slides and you're like, reading, your eyes are darting back and forth quickly, you're kind of reading something on a different screen. And so we'll take all those considerations into consideration and rate each individual on a call by way of engagement. So if you look at a civil summary or a civil call recording as it plays, as you're watching the actual video, you can actually watch each person's engagement or disengagement throughout the call and really clue into those moments of, hey, this was an important I'm trying to close this deal. The economic buyer, Sally, was looking down and really not into the last component when I was pitching something really important. So now I'm going to remember that. I'm going to go back next call and make sure she heard it so that I have increased my chances of maybe closing this deal and making sure that that point really stuck. So it's a really beautiful piece of technology. We call it behavioral AI, and we've been at it over three years developing that technology, and it really feeds into the accuracy and the utility ability of all the other stuff we described on this call. So summaries transcription, all that is prompted by behavioral cues that complement the English being said with nonverbal communication. 1.2s It. Yeah, 

U2

again, you said it so well. But yeah, I want to give some basic examples. When people are presenting, oftentimes you're sharing your screen and you just go into it. And first of all, most of the time, you can't even see the people reactions. You only see your screen because you're presenting. So it's very hard for the person to even see anybody else's reaction time. You could barely even know who's talking, right? Because there are so many people on the call and you're just presenting. And so the ability, like you said, if you ask any salesperson, any good salespeople, and say, would you like to have those cues? Would you like to know those things? Just something basic like that, where you can go back and look at the video and know when I was presenting, obviously I wasn't listening because I was presenting. But I can see now, like you said, Sally was looking down, sally was using her phone. She wasn't even listening to what I was saying. Right. Like, those kind of things, I think is tremendous. Right. I think it can help salespeople be a lot more successful. So that's awesome there. So let's say we kind of get to kind of the run now, which is SDRs BDRs. Really hard to train and repeat success, right. How can you guys, through the different AI system or through your overall civil platform, help with maybe onboarding SDRs and helping them and repeating that success? Because that's one of the hardest things for companies. 

U1

It? Yeah, I think it's really where a lot of these tools started. So Conversational Intelligence as a space has probably been around 1.3s eight years or so as far as mainstream and they started as 1.6s Sales enablement tools. Basically, if you're a B player or a new rep, you can up level your game to and A or just ramp quickly by listening to all the calls from the A players. And those are typically categorized and sort of segmented by sales enablement because they know who the best reps are and those calls sort of bubble their way to the top. So there's a huge utility to both cutting down ramp time and up leveling the game of all of your team by using tools like this and sharing the calls and making it available to everyone in the company on their own time. So 1.8s that's really something that this industry has been built on and still continues to be a huge reason to invest. Because let's face it, if you're a CRO listening to this and you don't run Conversational Intelligence today. 1s And you probably want to. What's probably top of mind for you is I got to hit my number this year. I don't necessarily have time to do a bunch of trainings, so what's the change management around this type of tool, right? And how do I introduce it to my team? How do I get them to embrace it if they're not used to it? And do I have time for that? And what I would tell you is that it would be an investment. It is culture shift in how you manage your team, how they get used to running their day. Most of them have used it before, but probably half of them, give or take, haven't. Right. But the return on ramp time of your new team coming in is going to be immense. And the amount of learning that will organically happen on the team because they can really peer into each other's calls is going to be so immense. It'll be worth that investment, I guarantee it. And I think with the popularity of this industry the crowd has spoken, if you will, because most companies, especially in high tech, are running tools like this because they're really helpful. So does that help? 

U2

Yeah, well, first of mean you're just a wealth of knowledge. I can talk to you for hours and I learn a lot every time I talk to you. But as we kind of wrap up the conversation here, I want to go back to what Sybil's kind of goal is, which is to eliminate non revenue generating activities for salespeople. And that is a very bold yet amazing goal. So wrap up the conversation, obviously throughout what you and I just talked about, you guys are eliminating the call recording, the notetaking, the CRM updates, the summaries. Right. So you're already through those examples, demonstrating kind of that non revenue activities, non revenue generating activities. Can you give us any other examples maybe current or in the future that you guys are planning to further reduce more of those activities, you 

U1

think? Yeah, well, we touched a little bit on CRM updates through dealsync and I just want to double click on what that really means. So one of the most popular frameworks out there in the industry is Medic, right? Or MEDPic if you use that flavor of it. And basically it's a deal qualification framework that a lot of enterprise companies and SMB and market companies use to qualify business. So things like what are the metrics the customer is using to make this evaluation decision? Who's economic buyer right, what's the decision criteria, what's the decision process? All those letters that make up the Medic moniker are based on things that are reasons that deals slip, right. And they're things to double click into. So a lot of people use this methodology, a lot of the most successful companies use it. And it is a painful thing to update and it is constantly a bunch of blank fields in CRM and it's a lot of subjectivity as well, rep interpretation of the situation right, which lead to deal risk. So it's time consuming for everybody, including the CRO to go through, time consuming for the rep to fill out. And half the time when if they do fill it out, it's subjective. Wouldn't it be amazing if there was a world where you could have AI update Medic fields or even we do Spiced by Winning by Design. Very different framework but similar in concept. Okay, we work with both of those. Wouldn't it be amazing if it was updated for me as the customer speaks? So multiple calls over nine month sales cycle. Every time there's something, Sylvia will listen. Update those fields and make both the organization 1.7s and the rep and the customer, frankly, less burdened in working with the most objective information out there because it was said okay. Or if an email is sent, they will be able interpret that as, oh, we just picked up the economic buyer. CFO is now in the conversation. Guys, it's Mike, right? Mike Jones is the CFO, we think he's economic buyer on this deal and we now have a connection to them. So all of those things that really large enterprise companies have to do, or even if you're running Medic or Spiced in your organization, you know, it's a time consuming necessary process to increase win rate and sybil with our deal. Sync product is now here and it's in beta today. So just full disclosure, we're working with our first ten customers right now and working through different nuances of 1.3s what they want. But it's a beautiful piece of technology to really eliminate the amount of time it takes to make make those frameworks come to life within the enterprise. It. 

U2

Yeah, that would be a great world, to be honest, and even just you talking about it. I got different ideas and questions further to ask you. But the last question we always love asking our guests to wrap up is, you've seen a lot, you've done a lot. If you have to give one personal and or business advice that you're passionate about, 

U1

what do you think that'd be? Ben well, I'm obviously very passionate about AI. I think it's a wonderful time in the world right now, and I think a lot of people are concerned that AI is 1s going to take their jobs or automate them away or whatever. And I couldn't really disagree more, especially for revenue, CSMS and salespeople, because I really feel like embracing this technology is going to allow us to work in a much more human way and accelerate automate out. All this stuff we kind of don't really want to do, but need to do our jobs and allow us to come back to what is actually the most fun part of the role, which is interacting with customers, talking to customers, selling, going to dinners, all the fun stuff that we all want to do. And while we're in this business, using AI 1.2s to get back to more of that, I think is really the most exciting part about this point in time in the world. And it's only accelerating, it's only getting better. And literally every month there is new innovation in this space and it just feels like a gold rush of sorts. Right. Bigger than even mobile. For me, probably the biggest two shifts in my career of the last 25 years have been SaaS and mobile technology. Those are the two main things that have been big shifts in how people have worked that really have changed 1.5s the way we work forever. Right. AI, I think, is bigger than both of those, and I think we're just at the very beginning of what you can do with it to help assist humans to be more human, and that really excites me. 1.5s

U2

Yeah, I can't agree more. And the pace of innovation, like, things that we thought would take ten years is happening every single month, the pace of innovation. But it's also competition, right? Because Microsoft is doing it now. Google is like, oh no, I got to do it. And then while they're doing it, everybody else is like, trying to catch up. So the whole market is pushing each other to then innovate even faster, which I think people like us and the customer are just going to benefit off of that. But I think it's going to come down to who can leverage I think AI to some degree has been democratized, good or bad, but now it's who can leverage this commodity technology now to do something unique with it or valuable with it. And I think you guys shown tremendous 1.2s insight and foresight to do that. And I think everything we talked about is amazing. Excited to partner with you guys and thanks for being on the show. Awesome. Thanks so much, Victor. Have a great day. You too, Ben. 

That was an amazing episode of the Did you know podcast with Varisource. Hope you enjoyed it and got some great insights from it. Make sure you follow us on social media for the next episode. And if you want to get the best deals from the guest today, make sure to send us a message at sales@varisource.com.