It is now possible to radically grow your business by improving the hand-off between marketing, sales, customer success, and even finance through the use of advanced intelligent virtual assistants. In this podcast, we’ll talk to Jim Kaskade, CEO of Conversica about how they’re helping their 2000 global customers speed up communications, improve customer satisfaction, get better lead coverage, qualify prospects more effectively, and increase deal close rates (up to 400% improvement!)

-- Timing –

00:00 Introduction

01:21 Sales and marketing have been traditionally misaligned and out of sync

03:00 Unpacking the marketing to sales process

03:20 Marketing often has a low return on investment and a lot of waste

04:19 Lead nurturing might need two follow-ups but probably more likely needs ten or maybe twenty to be successful

05:14 Sales teams are drowning in in-bound “marketing qualified leads”

07:15 There are over 8,000 marketing apps and many sales apps, what’s the gap here?

09:05 Digital transformation and marketing automation has caused a volume problem that the human sales reps can’t handle

10:46 Sales teams now have a filtering and prioritizing problem

11:56 If you haven’t automated marketing, you don’t have these problems yet!

13:55 Automating the back office is about cost optimization, optimizing the front office (sales, marketing, customer experience) is about increasing revenue

14:20 Solving this overload and filtering problem with AI

15:06 From Clippy the paperclip to Intelligent virtual assistants, it has been a long road

17:07 Moving way beyond the initial IVA use cases of technical support and into marketing and sales

18:30 You could have a conversation with an IVA for weeks or months until you’re ready to buy

20:43 Deep learning has significantly changed the game 

22:04 Applying and productizing AI to solve a problem…is harder than solving the AI at the core of the product

23:46 Where do Amazon, Microsoft, and Google fit into the picture in terms of providing Natural Language Processing engines?

25:07 How does a customer operationalize something like this? How do they install and use it?

26:01 Platforms are too hard for many customers so we deliver this as an application

27:30 We sell in a way that’s understandable and budgetable – by the “virtual assistant” – assigned to a departmental budget

29:24 You have actual working inside marketing reps, SDRs, and inside sales agents?

30:21 Are these IVAs replacing people? Or augmenting them?

32:04 What if every human member of their team had an assistant who could help move business along?

34:00 Can these assistants replace field sales people or people working high-touch, complex, multi-buyer deals?

35:29 What it’s like when you have virtual team members and how they can hand-off customers to other virtual assistants or to humans

39:30 This all sounds like science fiction

41:00 Use cases – educational course selection, technology conference attendance

42:50 The value of true intelligent virtual assistants – increased close rates (up to 4x improvement); reconnecting with customers who are dropping off usage (CX); 176x pipeline growth; 10x revenue; higher customer retention rates; faster cashflow from receivables and more

45:35 On the internet nobody knows you’re an intelligent virtual assistant – the ethics of disclosure

49:18 98% of the time, people think they’re talking to a real human

50:03 The present and future markets of intelligent automation, robotic process automation, chatbots, conversational AI, and intelligent virtual assistants

53:58 Where is Conversica focused?

57:34 Wrap up and contact info

59:01 Sign-off

-- Links --

https://conversica.com