When I worked at Hyperproof (from 2019 to 2023), I reported to its Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) and worked closely with him, several sales directors, and many sales reps. My time there taught me what it takes to be great at sales and how challenging the role of a sales professional can be.
At Hyperproof, one of my jobs was to equip salespeople with the knowledge and content they needed to win. I trained reps on various topics, covering the company’s target customers, key industry trends, basic compliance concepts (as many reps have never worked in the compliance space before), the company’s products, and how they differed from the competition. I also created much of the content sales reps would share with prospects –such as case studies, one-pagers, decks, videos, and ebooks.
I attended weekly calls where our CRO and the sales directors reviewed deals progress with the C-Suite. I knew what the sales teams struggled with at any time; I witnessed and supported multiple initiatives to help the sales reps perform better.
Through my time at Hyperproof and in my role after, I was struck by just how difficult and complex the role of a B2B software sales professional is. Here are the requirements and challenges put upon sales professionals:
Although many brilliant, well-intentioned people do many different things to help sales reps perform better, the results are inconsistent. There is not enough predictability from deal to deal, from rep to rep. Each stakeholder (e.g., sales leaders, marketing leaders, enablement, and training professionals) has ideas and hypotheses about what will improve performance. Each tries their best, but not enough actions are based on proven tactics and facts.
I wanted to help sales organizations gain more fact-based insights to propel revenue growth (e.g., increase win rate, ACV, or velocity). Can we guide sales reps to do and say the right things based on what’s already worked?
Most organizations already have the winning playbooks and tactics hiding in their sales/customer interaction data (e.g., call transcripts, email exchanges, CRM records). What if we could build a system that applies AI and ML to a company’s comprehensive historical sales data –including CRM data, recorded calls, email threads, and chats – and surface what has actually worked to progress and win deals?
Semantic analysis of call transcripts and emails from just a single deal can yield many valuable insights, including:
If we could surface these insights and package them in a highly accessible way, every sales rep would benefit from them. These insights can help each rep take a more intelligent approach to every deal.
To validate my hypothesis, I began to conduct research. Over the winter and spring of 2024, I conducted many interviews with sales leaders, managers and sales reps selling software products. The problems I had personally observed were replayed back to me, providing a solid foundation for the development of Intersight.
One of the biggest problems sales professionals shared was that when they first approached a deal, there were a lot of unknowns. The sales rep had to make a lot of assumptions; they didn’t know what precisely this prospect/account cared about, what specific capabilities were critical to them, and what the sticking points would be once they entered into a negotiation. Sales reps wanted to approach each deal from a place of knowledge and confidence; they wanted to tell relevant customer stories and convey to the prospects that they were experts on the customer’s pain points and the solution they needed.
By April 2024, I had collected enough data and felt motivated to build the solution. Thus, Intersight was born. I decided our mission would be “To help every organization unlock customer insights, winning playbooks, and tactics within their own data to improve revenue outcomes.”
But helping companies unlock proven tactics to win more deals is just one part of my greater goal. I also want to apply AI to help automate away the manual, tedious tasks sales professionals have to perform today, so they can have time to focus on the things that really matter.
At Intersight, we are creating an entirely new category of application: We are combining an AI-powered insights engine with an insights/playbook delivery platform, a content management platform, and a work management system reps want to use. We want sales reps to easily do deal planning, meeting prep, and follow-up work from a single place.
With Intersight, sales professionals will have access to playbooks on how to approach each deal and buyer persona, as well as content recommendations and insights to help them prioritize their deals. They will also access AI tools that streamline their work, from writing and document creation to note-taking and task completion. Revenue leaders can leverage an insights engine powered by company data to identify the tactics and messaging that drive winning outcomes. Enablement professionals, on the other hand, can spend less time maintaining/updating content asset libraries while ensuring reps always use the best content for each prospect and deal situation.
At Intersight, we are on a mission, and our success is linked to the success of the organizations we serve. We are excited to continue on this journey; it feels like a meaningful way to spend our time.
