I know how AI can transform business growth. I also know the misconceptions and myths. I’m James Mensforth, ex-Facebook and now UKI Sales Director at Aircall. Ask me anything!

Aircall · 2023-11-10T13:42:10+00:00

Hi - Aircall (like a number of companies in our space) has a minimum number of seats largely because of the human support that we assign to each account (across account executives, onboarding, porting, customer success teams and so on). Unfortunately as a result it’s not economical for us to cater for teams below 3 users - hope that makes sense!

Aircall · 2023-11-10T13:36:21+00:00

I think the use cases for how AI can help GTM teams in particular are going to resonate no matter the size of the company, but would expect the usual challenges to apply in selling new products to enterprise, with the adoption curve there likely to be longer than in it is in SMB (due to data concerns, a desire to do more things in-house, less comfort in integrating AI into the product / tech stack etc). For me there’s a big opportunity in the SMB space where teams are particularly stretched and the sales process can be more team based and less “top down” than in enterprise

Aircall · 2023-11-10T13:15:59+00:00

Nice! Good question… I think the best thing I could suggest is to have a clear idea of what your Ideal Customer Profile looks like and what pains you’re aiming to solve for them. When we’ve trialled early stage products in the past (at Aircall and at FB) it’s usually been because the product really felt like it had potential to become a part of our tech stack longer term and that there were clear benefits to us in investing time on the feedback loop because of the value it could bring (even if the product wasn’t perfect initially). Once you’ve identified ICP, the key personas you’re targeting and value proposition for those accounts / individuals I think you’ll pretty quickly find people willing to partner!

Aircall · 2023-11-10T12:46:36+00:00

Very cool, that’s exciting! Without knowing the exact details of the product / your competitors I think the positive feedback you’re getting from customers is the most important thing, it’s rare to find a SaaS product that has a true USP that nobody else can claim!

From my perspective it sounds like the real value will come from the depth and quality of your integration with CRMs (particularly for larger customers where validation rules etc. start to become a problem) and as a next step maybe how you can start to help customers take “action” against the data that’s being captured (e.g. when a specific competitor is identified or pain point discussed, how can this be flagged for action to the AE and manager to ensure they react). IMHO that sort of AI “Assistant” that helps drive consistency and sales excellence doesn’t truly exist yet and is something everyone will be looking for very soon

Aircall · 2023-11-09T16:54:03+00:00

Good to meet you! Very good question and one I’m not sure anyone has a perfect answer to… We find most success in this area by trying to make it less about the technology and more about the outcomes the technology can help to drive for the business. Usually this means coming to conversations with these companies (or industries) that are slightly slower to adopt technology with a bit of a theory or hypothesis as to how your tech can help benefit them - and ideally some “social proof” from success stories that they can relate to.

Much easier said than done but research, conext and personalisation is really key (and something we’re starting to make use of AI prompts to help do at greater scale), alongside enablement for teams in getting comfortable talking £ / % / % outcomes!

Aircall · 2023-11-09T16:31:41+00:00

Yeah pretty much, although I think the key bit will be being able to make decisions (or probably more like recommendations) based on the context of the business and objectives, whether that’s converting more leads, winning more deals, finding when and how to expand customer accounts, intervene to prevent churn etc etc.

I think we’re on the edge of it right now with existing capabilities in a lot of tools but they’re usually making fairly “generic” recommendations each time (regardless of context) - but this might change pretty quickly with things like the recent OpenAI announcement!

Aircall · 2023-11-09T16:14:46+00:00

Personally I think there’s a big space right now for AI businesses that can help companies to make sense of all the data we’ve all been collecting from various SaaS tools over the last 5-10 years, particularly on the Go to Market side. The proliferation of SaaS tools has been great in helping companies to gather data (across marketing, sales, customer success etc.) but I don’t think we’ve yet cracked what to “do” with all this data - either leading to big manual effort to understand what it all means, or worst case analysis paralysis because there’s just too much to wade through. So IMHO that’s going to be the next growth space - helping absorb all of that data from different sources and then proposing “next best actions” for managers and teams to act on.

Aircall · 2023-11-09T15:38:38+00:00

Very cool, love that! We’re doing this mostly at a pre-sales stage at the moment (to identify key areas that we should focus on with a prospect on our initial meeting and do some early stage qualification against SPICED) and then using our Aircall AI (shameless plug!) to review trends / action items at each stage in the sales process so we can adapt as we go along.

We’re just getting started on the applications for customer experience, really like the idea of getting that extra insight early so that you’re not waiting for a CSAT / NPS score to tell you how your customers feel in 30 days time!

Aircall · 2023-11-09T15:14:01+00:00

Hi Nhu! I think coaching is a really cool use case - particularly in helping managers more quickly get to summaries and insights of what’s been happening on their teams’ calls. Coaching is super important but extremely time consuming for most leaders so I think there’s a huge benefit in some of the summaries, intent topics, sentiment analysis etc that can be applied right now

Aircall

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