AI Sales Coaching for MSPs (EP 873)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, the show for IT professionals and managed service providers to help you run your business better, smarter and faster. We are continuing our march to Orlando where we will hopefully be able to see on stage the three finalists for the ConnectWise PitchIT Accelerator program. So we are in the middle of our vendor PitchIT profiles and today I have with me Jean Templin with NAYAK and they are an innovative AI powered sales enabling platform and let's see what they can do to help us get more business. 

Jean, welcome to the show. Thank you, thank you. Should I call you Unc or Uncle Marv? You can call me Uncle; you can call me Uncle Marv. 

I don't know. Unc sounds a little weird. So Jean, tell me more about NAYAK because when I looked at it, my very first thing is that this could be for any business. 

Why specifically MSPs? MSPs are struggling to do sales. It's one of the main items that comes up in all the surveys and what we're really excited about is helping the channel. We've been in the channel before and we understand that not only can we sell it to you but then you can sell it to your customers in the future, right? And really we're building this to help what we call, and I'm going to steal it from Huntress guy, we're not building it for the Fortune 500 but for the 5 million customers out there who could use something to really help sales.

It is a universal problem but we're really laser focused into adding value for the MSPs. All right. Now, is there a particular problem that you found that would work or what was the aha moment that started you down this path? Yeah, I think the aha moment came when I was working at Twilio and we were trying to sell a very complex call center software and we were seeing how hard it was for salespeople to really understand technical jargon that needed to be spoken or we had really technical people like the architect layers who couldn't speak salesy.

So it is that combination of, and I think it resonates a lot in the MSP market where we have a lot of techie people who don't always know how to speak salesy as much or if they hire a salesperson then they're really not into that tech side of it. So that's really where we see this happening. I saw it in my own experience and then decided to build it into a product.

Okay. Now, you mentioned that you've been in the channel before. You mentioned being at Twilio.

So you're not new to this. This is not a new rodeo thing for you. You've actually co-founded other organizations. 

What was it that specifically drew you, not just the NIOC platform and all of that, but what drew you into doing this as another venture? Yeah. I think right now this AI technology is unlocking a lot of opportunity to do things you couldn't do before. So we do real-time coaching, right? And we coach not only on what to say, but how to say it. 

And the how to say it part is really like the read the room or technically scientifically it's called emotional intelligence. And that was always thought of, you couldn't do it because every scenario was different. And unless you were sitting right next to the person, it was hard to coach that. 

But with technology today, like AI and a lot of the ability to listen in on the call in real time and analyze it, you're able to do that now at an affordable cost. Let's put it that way. We have now the technology to do what we needed; we couldn't do in the past. 

So that's really what drove me is this evolution of AI and seeing it unfold in front of us and all the new use cases that it can kind of solve for. All right. So you've already mentioned one of the key features of the real-time sales coaching.

There's also a couple of other components. One thing I want to ask you about this smart call planning. And I saw that it says it can analyze customer data from the CRMs and help with your call planning. 

That's correct. So yeah. So we think about how it gets enhanced when you're in the CRM, you put your lead in and it says, this is the company. 

So we even take it a step further and we enhance it. We do company profiles and we also do for each and every call, a meeting planner, or what we call a cheat sheet is typically what we call it. And it talks about a couple of things. 

It talks about the people on the call. It talks about the questions or things that you should be talking about in the call. And it also gives you some relevant trends or information about the things that could actually bring the urgency in the call. 

For instance, for MSP specifically, if you're out and you're selling cybersecurity and you know that they had a breach because we can do a dark web scan for you, you can bring it up right there in the call without having to do that. So we kind of prepare you for all that before you enter the call. And then of course it naturally leads into the real time coaching. 

So it's kind of a one, two punch, right? Prepare. And we do all that research for you. And then we come in, we take a note and then we do the real time to help coach. 

And then of course at the end, we summarize it up. All right. Integrated CRMs. 

So obviously I'm going to assume you're part of the ConnectWise family. I am. What we are in the process of integrating into ConnectWise PSA. 

We do go high level and we're also do HubSpot. In the future we plan Salesforce and a couple of others. It really depends on what people are looking for. 

And our goal is not to create a new pane of glass for you to have to work out of. We want you to work in the tools you're already working. So we're just trying to snap on and add on and provide the information. 

Okay. Now, once it gets into a CRM, I know that a lot of MSPs will allow not just their sales team, but of course their technicians and other people in there. This is geared towards a sales format. 

So it's usually going to be the owner or a sales team, but will the information in there also be helpful to the rest of the organizations? Sure. Well, it's all the conversations. Think of it, you know, summarize all the conversations. 

Call one, call two, call three, call four. And we actually have plans to extend the platform into onboarding and account management, right? Why not? It's kind of a natural thing. How can I help onboard the person properly and speak with them? How can I help account management really look at what was sold, what they're using, what other things we can use? Because it's just sales in a different format, right? It's not a new sale. 

It's an upsell. So yeah, absolutely. So that's the goal of this is really to give all that information and put it in one place and summarize it each and every time we're having a call.

So you don't have to look through all the notes or the 12 different calls that happened. The last one will be the summary of all the information that has happened to date. All right. 

So that sounds like something similar. You mentioned emotional intelligence earlier. And when I was looking at this up, it also talked about relationship intelligence.

That whole customer journey, you know, from start to finish, that sounds like what this is going to do hopefully when it's all said and done, right? Yeah. So yeah, I guess when you think about, and I think we all know this, we do this, we build relationships, right? It's not only, like I said, what you say, it's how you say it. And you're reading the room and you're looking at signals, right? And that reading the room and looking at sales rules, whether it's the way your face is, the tone of your voice, you're slowing down, if you're pausing, all these things we inherently do as humans, right? As we try to build relationships with people, we'll bring out commonalities, we'll bring out a lot of different things. 

And that's what we're building into this. So this is really where the emotional intelligence piece really helps people. We're kind of what almost like codifying it in many ways, where it hasn't been codified and layering it into the sales process to help teams really build those relationships. 

Because buyer journeys are changing, right? And they're saying, hey, I'm going digital first. I'm only going to talk to humans in sales when I need it. And I'm doing all my research. 

And when I come to the call, be ready. I want transparency. I want the stuff personalized to me. 

And I want to build the trust foundations so that I feel confident in my journey, right, as I purchase. And that's really what we're helping build that piece. And it's because people aren't prepared, because people aren't saying the right things, that trust and rapport kind of doesn't get built. 

And you see a lot of ghosting, you'll say, you'll see people say, oh, I have high intense scores. But yet, I don't hear from them ever again. That's because you haven't built their trust.

So that sounds interesting. So we talked about the fact that you're, you know, gathering all that information ahead of time to be prepared for the call. One thing I noticed on the site, too, talking about post call analytics. 

And ghosting is huge, because I know a lot of times, even myself, when I've called for support for my home products, ridiculously enough, and I'll just say I had that today, our Bosch refrigerator has an issue. So dealing with Bosch customer support was fun. But that post call feeling I had was just not where I wanted it to be. 

So I assume that the analytics in your program will help MSPs understand, okay, here's what we did, right? Here's what we did. Not so good. 

Here's where we can improve. Yeah, not only not, you know, though, it's giving transparency into the owners or the getting into the management team of MSPs into what their teams are doing right or wrong. It's also training, giving it to me as the individual sales rep, like, what did I do? Right? What did I do wrong in that call? Because you also want to know that. 

And then this analytics also at a much higher level can help understand what deals are actually better to close this month. So this idea of what in your funnel will close and what won't it when you understand, are you building the rapport you need to? Are you building the trust you need to and are you building the confidence you need to? And it also helps at certain points in the funnel to say, bring another person in, bring the manager in, bring this person, bring the CEO, whomever you need to at various points, it helps. It helps indicate those pieces. 

Okay. Now I see that this was started in 22. Was that really the time that you went live? Or how long have you actually been operating? We have been live for a while. 

We've had a bunch of pilot customers and we've really been driving through and there have been MSPs. So we've been driving through how do we ensure this has value? Right? And during our journey, interesting enough, we didn't have the emotional intelligence. And so we were driving through with just personalization and automation, which you see in some of the other tool sets, but we added some disk profiles, so personality traits. 

So if you've ever seen a disk profile, we'll tell you like I'm dominant or I'm a certain type of communication style. Right? And so when we did that, that's really when it started to generate the value that we thought was good enough to launch. Right? So, and since then we've been just automating and doing a lot of integrations into things so they can just snap it on top as we build out and round this product out. 

So it's been live for a little bit, but really I feel like the Polish project is really coming out now. The super Polish project product that will the MSPs can drive for free. All right. 

So I assume that a lot of that was based off of the feedback that you've received from the MSPs, right? AB testing, hardcore, like back and forth, sales teams using it, sales teams not using it. How does this really work? Because for me, I mean, I'm a hardcore product person and AB testing just to make sure there's enough value. There has to be value, right? Or somebody is not going to pay anything for it. 

And we really want to make sure that we help these teams grow their revenue. Right? That's really what the end goal is. And it's really that tone that how to sell, say what to say is important, but how to say it is the multiplier in many ways. 

Right. What's been your most surprising feedback that you've gotten? From the testing. I think one of the things that I never expected was that it almost becomes like a companion to them. 

There's this sales teams absolutely feel they have to have it on their call after a certain amount of time. And NAYAK in Sanskrit means wisdom and hero. So we always wanted to be here, the wisdom and hero person, but I didn't realize it would be quite as required, that psychological piece of it being there every time to feel the confidence and instill that confidence in the salespeople. 

So I guess in that sense, when would it not be available to them if they're not at the office and working off of a mobile phone or something? Let's say they have an in-person meeting right now, we're not available, but we're working on a solution for that. Right. So we know that has to happen. 

And there's also, sometimes you have communication and channels. Let's say, you know, emails, we're also working on that and figuring out how to add that tone and all that emotional intelligence into that aspect. Also, so there is channels that are not just the calls that we're working on. 

And the biggest one, I think, is that we've been asked for the in-person one on how often do they now that really is applicable when you go into the account management side and you're doing your QBRs. Sometimes you'll do them in person. Right. 

So, yeah, those are really where I think it's not there, but we're working on a solution. All right. And we're talking about MSPs now. 

So every one of them feels like they're special. So how much does your product allow for changes and nuances and tweaks and stuff like that to, you know, be customized for the MSP? Sure. Well, what we do is we actually create, yeah, we create like a sales enablement to which can be customized to anything. 

So we go out and do it for you in case you haven't done it. Again, we're trying to make it easy to use and then we can customize it. In the future, we're looking at, we've been asked for white labeling, we can open up our API, you can open up API so you can actually even enhance it more. 

But our goal really was to get come in with kind of like all the bells and whistles a Fortune 500 has and is using and give it to you as a solution. Right. Which is productivity, personalization, real time coaching all together in a tool. 

And of course, yeah, we already allow it's customizable for each company or MSP that comes in. And then because we allow for various frameworks, we allow for various the coaching situations to happen. And even in the future, we'll allow you to do it even more with opening up the platform. 

All right. And then early on, you mentioned that MSPs would be able to resell this. So what type of flow through support is that? Is that something where if I resell it to one of my customers, I have to support it? Or can we lean on you? Yeah, well, the resale model, we're kind of hacking out right now. 

So we'd love to learn from the team. Anybody want to talk to me, please do. We have heard that, you know, they want to sell it to their customers. 

We, which was we want to give a full white label for that. If you want to be able to do that, that's what we heard. But let's see what where it goes. 

Will they sell? And what you're saying is just resell it, right? And yeah, we when I was at IT, the Connect conference in Orlando, people came up and said, “Oh, I want to resell it. So that's really where, you know, the bells and whistles, I didn't realize that was such a need that people wanted to have this as another. But I do know that MSPs are being tapped to be AI experts, right? And how can I help in all the pieces of my business for small, medium sized businesses? So of course, it makes sense. 

So yeah, we're in the process of hammering that out. So if anybody wants to work with me on it, please give me a ring at my email, my phone number. And we will talk through it. 

Well, I can tell you this. So I wasn't always a big reseller of VoIP. But when I started doing it, anything that attached itself to VoIP would have been nice for me to be able to say, Yeah, I can do that for you too. 

And I did have a customer that had a little mini call center. So it would have been nice to have a product like this for them. So all right, well, Jean, we're coming up to the end here. 

So I want to make sure I give you enough room and runway. Hopefully, this is the first time that you have practiced your first full pitch for the competition. So I'm going to step aside and let you take it away.

Sure. So MSPs out there, I know you're struggling to grow sales. And we are here to help you do that.

We are an AI powered sales enablement tool. And we're really a package. We're exactly what Fortune 500 are building into their tech stacks, their sales tech stack. 

But we're pricing it for you because we are really believers in MSPs. We help you personalize, automate tasks, and coach in real time. And what we've seen is just from putting our solution in market, you get twice as the revenue opportunities. 

Now, many of you have also known that you're losing revenue, you're leaving it behind. And on average, a small, medium sized business, or even a mid-sized business, small, medium sizes are losing about 1 million annually, because they're not able to personalize an information that buyers are looking for. So we're here to give you all those tools. 

We snap on to existing systems already. So you don't have to worry about some not another pane of glass that you need to look at. And we're priced affordably, we're looking at $100 for the entire solution. 

That is we will do pre call sheets, pre call meeting sheets. So we automate a lot of the personalization and research. We are a note taker, we take notes during the call, we summarize the notes. 

But the real great thing we do is we coach the team in real time, not only on what to say, but how to say it. And we feel that any we feel that this is really the actual differentiator, the not what to say, but how to say it. We'd love to have you as part of our team, please reach out, we are doing a 30 day free trial to any MSPs. 

And again, we're here not only to help you grow, but we're helped to build this system, this this eco our entire channel into generating not only revenue for ourselves, but in the future, selling this through to your to your customers. Again, we're NAYAK, AI, and please 30 day free trial to give us a give us a chance to extra revenue. All right, Jean Templin, co-founder and product leader at NAYAK.

Jean, good job. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you. 

Have a good one. All right, folks, that's going to do it. We'll be back with more of the Pitch at Vendor profiles here coming up.

And that along with any other podcasts from the IT business podcast, head over to the website, find us in your favorite pod catcher. That's going to do it. We'll see you soon. 

And until next time, holla.