Enterprise sales are the holy grail for most businesses – the sale of products and services to a large company offers a potential step-change for revenues and profitability. The hitch is that these are also the hardest customers to sell to – it’s difficult to get a foot in the door in the first place; even when you do, navigating the internal processes and approval systems of large organisations is challenging.
Artificial intelligence provides a potential solution, believes Samir Manjure, CEO and co-founder of Vieu. The Seattle-based start-up, launched in 2022, is today announcing the successful completion of a $2 million seed fund round as it seeks to commercialise its enterprise sales solution.
“Many existing enterprise sales support solutions are very good at generating reams of data and insight, but what businesses really need is to be told what they need to do next,” says Manjure. “The advent of generative AI makes that possible.”
Manjure and his co-founder Simon Skaria, now Vieu’s chief technology officer, are both former executives at Microsoft and therefore have a good understanding of how even the largest enterprises operate. The inspiration for Vieu came out of their subsequent experience launching start-ups, where despite their corporate experience, they found it very difficult to clinch deals with the largest customers.
“I found out the hard way just how difficult it is to do enterprise sales,” Manjure recalls. “We then talked to about 75 sales leaders at other businesses to ask them if they’d faced the same sort of frustrations – they all talked about just how long it takes to sell to enterprise customers and how difficult it can be.”
Vieu’s pitch is that it will significantly reduce both the time and effort required to secure such deals. Early users, it says, have been able to get a first meeting with their target enterprise customer five times more quickly than in the past; the productivity of sales teams using Vieu has increased threefold, the company claims.
To deliver those benefits, Vieu uses AI in order to generate “warm introductions” to companies seeking to sell to an enterprise. Its software scrapes resources such as LinkedIn to identify the key people of influence at the target customer – those responsible for buying the product or service in question. Vieu’s AI engine also interrogates data on the business’s own staff to identify possible shortcuts to making contact with these key people – perhaps you already employ someone who’s worked with a key decision-maker at the potential customer; maybe there’s another link to exploit.
“We can provide the email addresses and telephone numbers of the people sales need to speak to, but we hope we don’t have to,” says Manjure. “The better option is to identify existing connections, which makes that first contact easier.”
Crucially, promises Manjure, Vieu can do more than simply provide businesses with key contacts. Its software also analyses the public utterances of these decision makers to identify their interests and concerns; it can then work out who to approach for the greatest chance of success, and provide the sales team with a template suggestion of how to approach them with relevance. And once a meeting is secured, the AI can also automate the creation of pitch documents that are tailored to the challenges faced by the target customer.
All of which sounds impressive. The question is whether it works. Vieu, operating in stealth mode so far, has attracted around a dozen customers, and says these early adopters’ experience of using the software has given it the confidence to step up its commercialisation efforts. Today’s funding announcement marks the start of that drive, with the cash earmarked for product development and a significant expansion of the sales team.
Manjure himself is so confident in the product that Vieu is promising to refund customers’ money if it can’t deliver the customers that a business wants. “Machines are supposed to be matching the performance of human beings, so they should be paid in the same way,” he explains. “Sales teams get paid according to leads and sales, so why should sales software be any different?”
Certainly, some customers are happy to sing the business’s praises. Vishal Gupta, CEO of Seclore, one of Vieu’s users, says: “Cold outreach and traditional account-based marketing just doesn’t work while selling to large enterprises; we need to protect our brand while reaching out to target customers, demonstrate our insights in solving their business problems, and strive to deliver value in our very first interaction.”
Investors in the business – around 20 business angels, including founders and CEOs, as well as a number of prominent sales executives – are also optimistic. “CRM systems have long failed to create a self-updating data system for actionable, real-time customer intelligence,” says one of the firm’s backers, Lila Tretikov, former CEO of Wikimedia Foundation and now deputy CTO at Microsoft. “Vieu uses AI to fuse internet, enterprise, and end-user data to create a data moat, making sales teams more effective with auto-generated plans and turn-by-turn assistance.”
Still, there are multiple enterprise solutions to compete with, including giants of the industry such as Salesforce and Zoominfo. Vieu’s challenge will be to prove that its use of AI really does provide competitive differentiation.
Read the full article here