Updating the CRM after every call is an critical task for sales reps, but it involves a lot of administrative work that takes time away from actual sales. Attention wants to fix this with its sales assistant, which uses artificial intelligence technology and natural language processing to auto-populate the CRM after phone calls and create follow-up emails.
The Novel York-based startup announced today that it has raised $3.1 million led by Eniac Ventures with participation from institutional investors Frst, Liquid2 Ventures, Maschmeyer Group Ventures and Ride Ventures. The founders of Ramp, Pawp, Truework and CB Insights also participated in the round.
Attention was founded in September 2021 by CEO Anis Bennaceur and CTO Matthias Wickenburg. They met while running Swipecast and Mixer, competitive work platforms for original professionals. After five years of competing, the two had coffee and realized they faced many of the same sales challenges, including the need to constantly update Salesforce and onboard fresh sales reps as quickly as possible.
“After much hesitation, we decided to cooperate,” Bennaceur said. “I had hundreds of conversations with sales leaders and junior sales reps, asking about their pain points, digging into potentially desirable solutions and constantly improving them, while Matthias built those solutions in parallel. After many iterations, we knew we were onto something.”
One thing that attention helps with is CRM hygiene, which means making sure your CRM software is updated with immaculate and precise data. Bennaceur explains that this is critical because chief revenue officers and vice presidents of sales apply their organization’s CRM system to track customer interactions, manage leads, and analyze sales data. This allows them to make decisions about increasing revenues.
However, there are several barriers to maintaining CRM hygiene. First, it’s a lot of administrative work for sales reps and takes time away from actually selling. It’s also simple to miss data when a sales rep leaves their job or hands over accounts to other reps. This results in lost prospects and lost customers. Finally, without the ability to track what is being said during sales calls, it becomes more arduous for revenue leaders to decide how to pursue potential deals.
Note solves this problem by automatically exporting call data to CRM. For example, if your sales team uses the MEDDIC sales methodology, which is a six-step set of questions, Attention knows whether each step was covered in the call and exports that information to the appropriate Salesforce or HubSpot fields. This reduces the amount of work sales reps have to do while also giving revenue leaders greater visibility into prospects and revenue opportunities.
Using natural language processing, Attention is also able to identify content for sales coaching in conversations. During the call, it displays battle cards in real time to lend a hand sales reps know what to say. “Let’s say a prospect asks you a question about how to compare a competitor on specific capabilities. The battle card would contain the elements to properly answer this question and would appear on the screen during the conversation,” says Bennaceur.
To augment deal velocity, which is the speed at which a sales organization can negotiate and close deals, sales teams need to send a lot of emails quickly. But the follow-up email templates they often rely on are impersonal, and support emails sometimes leave out critical data, Bennaceur says. Attention can create post-conversation emails based on what was said during the conversation. For example, a sales representative might ask Attention to “write an email summarizing our conversation. Mention what challenges your potential customer faces and how our product can help them. And let’s talk about the next steps.”
Attention’s competitors include Gong and Chorus, which analyze customer conversations. Bennaceur says Attention’s advantage is its ability to flexibly understand conversations, display real-time prompts during calls, and conduct A/B testing for coaching. “We haven’t seen any of these players flexibly export calls to CRM systems, and that’s our strong advantage right now,” he said.
In a statement about the funding, Hadley Harris of Eniac Ventures said: “We are thrilled to be working with Anis and Matthias as they leverage the latest advances in artificial intelligence generation and natural language understanding in superpower sales organizations. We love working with repeat founders and couldn’t be happier with the strong traction they’re already getting from the market.”
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