- Hi, friends. Welcome to episode 8. I have a surprise for you today.

- So far, the format for my podcast has been one-on-one interviews with a single guest. Today, I've decided to spice things up a little, and have invited two guests. Their names are Shilpa Sharma and Chhavi Singh. They are the two co-founders of a Conversational NLP startup called Flyte AI, which helps with sales training, sales enablement, competitive intel, and a few other areas that, combined, help sales and marketing organizations ensure high quality interactions with prospects and customers.

- In a way, today's conversation is a continuation of what we discussed in episode 7. You may recall that my guest, Matt Dixon, had used Conversational NLP to analyze a couple of million sales calls to find out that customer indecision is quickly becoming the number one enemy of the sales organization.

- Today, speaking with Shilpa and Chhavi, we will learn more about platforms such as Flyte AI, that can help improve the productivity and effectiveness of sales organizations. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the Flyte AI team to the virtual stage.

- Hi, Shilpa, hi Chhavi, how are you guys doing?

- Doing well. Thanks for inviting today.

- Oh, absolutely. Thanks for coming to my podcast. I really appreciate your participation on this episode, and I'm also super excited because this is the first episode that I record with two guests at the same time. So this is a little bit new to me as a format, but I'm really looking forward to having this conversation with both of you. I'm gonna, as usual, I'm gonna start by adding a little call to action at the bottom for our viewers to visit cerebrations.info to learn a little bit more about Shilpa and Chhavi. They represent a company called Flyte AI, so we're gonna have some information there. It links to their profiles, so if you're interested in getting in touch, you can do that that way. And also by going to the website, you can always see what other interviews we have with other guests. So you can catch up on some of our previous episodes. So without any further ado, let's get started. So I will ask you a question that maybe both of you can answer, but let's start with Shilpa first. How did you get involved with sales enablement technology?

- Sure, that's an interesting question, Emil. So sales enablement technology, actually, it didn't start in a day or two. It comes from a long background. I have worked in finance and technology, closely worked with sales teams primarily. So I have seen like companies leaders and sales leaders struggling with other things like forecasting and to be able to understand how their sales team is performing. So we used to work a lot on manual things like structuring something in Excel or trying to do something, making strategies for them, to make sure they feel like their team is streamlined, they understand what's going on in their customer mind and all that. So working with Intel and JP Morgan before, this gave me a great idea about sales operations, and that's where sales enabled technology, the background, started and the the Flyte concept that started with a very benign and casual conversation with a friend, who just mentioned how he struggles with a lot of manual things or going back to the sales recordings just to see what kind of objections were appearing in their sales conversations and all that. So started with that and Chhavi and I, we both were in that one conversation and we realized there may be a good market there. We ended up looking at technologies and we also looked at the market. So after realizing like it's big enough market and big enough challenge for sales leaders to understand how their team is working with clients, what kind of thinking is going on when client is listening to their product demos to their pitch, that's where it all started. And since then we have never looked back. Went through Techstars program, founder institute program, we got accepted in a lot of pitch competitions and it became a company in some time and that's when the whole thing started when we launched our platform and now working with a lot of promising tech companies, health tech companies to serve this product to them and helping them to streamline their sales operations.

- Great, thanks. That's a very useful context. I really appreciate the information that you provided. Chhavi, I'm gonna ask you the next question, but before that, I just wanted to say that I've seen Flyte AI in action and there is a lot to be said about the way Conversational NLP and the rest of the functionality of that platform and other similar platforms could do to help sales executives. I will postpone this part of the conversation until a little later in this episode. Before we do that, I want to focus on some of the fundamentals because the main theme of the episode is that it matters a lot how sales folks talk to their prospects. So Flyte AI keeps stats of several interesting metrics that can be used to describe each sales call. One example is the ratio of talking versus listening. Another one is clarity of speech. Another one will be positive versus negative sentiment or the number of interruptions during the conversation. So I thought it'll be interesting to unpack the importance of those metrics. So let's start with one of those first and maybe, Chhavi, you can help me with that. But you know, how should a sales executive interpret measures of sentiment on a sales call?

- Great question, Emil. This is an extremely interesting area within sales today. Historically, people have been listening to sales calls and just trying to understand what was the client really feeling? Was he feeling happy when he said something or not so happy? Was he confused? What was the emotion behind that? Because as everyone understands, sales decisions are emotional decisions. So a finger on that pulse is extremely important. A lot of folks did not have the tools necessary to be able to measure that in the past. When we conceptualized Flyte, this was one of the main things we wanted to introduce into the market where you have constantly the ability to constantly measure what the client is thinking at any point in time. We are able to capture sentiment at every single sentence level, and therefore, we are able to tell when a client mentions something, whether that's name of the competitors or any product feature or just about anything specific that's important to you, we are able to tell what was the client thinking, were they thinking of it in a positive or a negative way? And usually what's actually not said is sometimes even more important than what's said. And being able to derive sentiments from those is a very extremely positive and useful strategy for sales teams that want to compete and out-compete their competitors. So having that ability to measure gives you a sense of, okay, when I mention these things, my client responds positively, when I mention the other things, they do not. How can I change that? How can I tweak my messaging to connect better with the client and therefore increase my odds? So that's been the most important aspect of introducing sentiment and it's been a game changer throughout, whenever we've shown it to customers, they've been extremely excited to finally have the ability to get a sense of the feelings and emotions that are sitting behind that face of the prospect.

- So it's almost like a way to do AP testing on the spot. Basically, you're mentioning certain things and you measure how people react to those. Or on the other hand, even from, you know, outside of sales, but from a marketing research perspective, you can still see whether people tend to react more positive to certain messaging or ideas versus others. So it's very interesting. I know that there are several metrics that I mentioned, so I'm kind of going faster here because we don't have a lot of time to cover this, but I think it's a very interesting subject. I'm just gonna jump to the next metric for the sake of time. So, Shilpa, maybe you can help me with that one. How can a savvy sales exec leverage insights about the talk versus listen ratio or the number of interruptions, what does it mean when they see those things?

- Sure. That's a very interesting metric that we wanted to capture. So just to highlight the fact that how we came up with these metrics to get a sense of sales conversations and how they can improve on their conversations. So these things like how much time do you talk and how much time do you spend on listening to customer's point of view as well? That's an important metrics because what happens when you are having a conversation as a salesperson because you have probably 15 conversations in a day and then you have a lot of conversations in the month. Sometimes your pitch is so ready that you feel like "I want to speak about every feature, I want to talk about everything." But sometimes the challenge is coming from very specific part of your product and you need to realize that. And if you don't listen to the challenges the customer is talking about, you won't be able to understand what kind of product demo it should be. So for a product demo or even a negotiation, there are different stages in a deal, and every time you are part of a conversation, you need to understand like it's not a standard product demo that you want to give to client. Everyone has different needs, everyone has different challenges. That's where the stock versus listen ratio comes into picture and it becomes very important because you want to know in the beginning of a call that the person is looking for these four specific nuggets and then you touch upon that, not the entire product demo and then exploring what kind of things this person was looking for in the beginning. So those are the things that are very important, and in our platform we try to gauge that at every stage. For example, if a salesperson SDR starts from prospecting, then they go into product demo, then probably they look into negotiations and pricing discussions, implementation discussions, closed discussions, all those things. Every conversation has specific things to talk about. In product demo, for examples, of course you will talk more because you are telling your product and you're explaining a lot of features there. But prospecting, then pricing, you need to listen more. So for every stage there is a certain ratio that you need to maintain to be able to understand customer's point of view. So to understand this ratio is highly important for a salesperson and we try to give that for the entire team. So the cloud performers, how they manage the conversations, versus those probably who have just joined the team and are learning about the sales process within the organization, they have the ability to understand from the successful people on the team. So these kind of metrics help them a lot in terms of faster onboarding, faster training. We also talk about the interruptions because you want make sure that you are not talking over each other when you are talking to a client, you have patience level and you make sure once the client has finished talking, then you answer them so that patients and interruptions that have to be managed as well. So these metrics become very important to increase your conversion and have a successful conversation with your clients.

- I see. Okay. So a lot of that actually happens almost after the fact, as sales like executive, you look at these metrics and you can navigate your team and train them how to become better as they go from one call to another. Let's move on to one of the other metrics that I mentioned. Clarity of speech. Obviously, I think everyone wants to be clear in their speech, in the way they express themselves. And I think a lot of people consider themselves pretty good, especially on the sales side. I mean, they've done it for several years now. They feel like they know their pitch, they know what they're talking about. So what exactly, I mean, maybe Chhavi, now we can go back to you. What exactly should I be looking for there if I was a sales executive using this platform?

- Oh Emil, thanks for including this question, this is extremely important. So really excited to talk about it. So this is actually the first time any sales enablement tool has introduced this concept of clarity, but it's absolutely fundamental to any salesperson. So when you are a sales rep or any speaking with the prospect, and you're explaining something to the client, you're probably explaining it for the 50th or the thousandth time in that month. Whereas the client who has 5,000 other things going on in their company might be listening to this for the first time, which means that even though you might be an expert at your product, the other side might not be. So just like a teacher that tries to simplify things, if you understand something, you have the ability to explain that as well. So you want to actually make sure that you explain everything in a very clear, concise, short manner. So using short clear sentences to help bring the point home to make sure you take the pauses that are necessary for the other person to absorb what you just told them or showed them in a demo and then waiting for them to respond either affirmatively or with a question. That way of tweaking your product demo or any conversation in general helps a salesperson connect with the other side in a better way. If the client goes back after a call not understanding what you just showed them in half an hour or one hour demo, there's a very little chance they're gonna come back excited to go ahead with the deal. So having high clarity is absolutely important. People within the sales committee haven't had a chance to be able to measure that quantitatively in the past and that that has been something that's been missing with sales tools. What we've done is we've provided this ability to capture how clearly are you speaking? Do you use a lot of qualifier words like ambiguous words, like however, maybe, sure, perhaps. Or are you using very clear, concise sentences? This goes a long way in creating an effective sales pitch and explaining something in clarity. Use as few examples, as few commas as possible. Just have one tiny message in every sentence is make sure that the other person is absorbing. That's essentially the key.

- I see. Yeah, it's fascinating and I wonder whether, I'm not sure if I understand correctly exactly everything you measure on the clarity side, but I wonder if that also takes into account overuse of buzzwords because what happens to me sometimes, I mean, I'm on the other side, I get pitched a lot and you know sometimes some reps and especially those that are maybe a little more junior in the role and they don't feel that secure in terms of really discussing the problems at hand, the pain points that I may have, they just jump into a hodgepodge of bunch of buzzwords that, you know, at one point, I just have a headache listening to that and I kind of tune off because I just don't want to hear that many buzzwords in one sentence. So is that also measured there? Is that somewhere else like in your product?

- Yes, it is measured. We do capture buzzwords, we actually remove some of them the filler words, actually, to try and clarify and make things clear. But we do measure the fact that if you use a lot of ums and uhs and all those filler words, it plays a role in declining the clarity that you have in the score that you get eventually. So people when they look at their results within Flyte for the first time are usually very surprised. Everyone thinks they're very clear in how they peak. So when they look at that and then they make an effort to be clear the next time around and then they see their clarity score going up, that's usually the the point where they realize, okay, I need to make more effort there and they can start seeing the result right away. So yeah, the first step is to measure that something like this is happening and then the next step is to handle that and cater to that. So that's been a way we've been able to help sales teams and sales folks tune their messaging and make it more clear and concise.

- I see. Okay. Well, I mean we discussed a few, but you know, are there any other metrics that's we can all use to evaluate the core quality of our sales reps performance? Is there anything else that in general is interesting to be aware of as an executive to listen for maybe should? Maybe Shilpa.

- Sure, sure. So we talked about a lot of metrics, we talk about talk-listen ratio, the clarity and sentiment. There's one thing that stands out There's one thing that stands out when we have conversations, even like for trials when we showcase initial capabilities of our platform to potential customers, the engagement score comes up and really, very often, people think what kind of metric is that and how does it help me? First is engagement and then second is patience level. They go hand in hand. If you have very engaging conversation, for example, as a sales rep, For example, as a sales rep, if you are pitching to a client and you're talking about something, are they curious? Are they asking a lot of questions? Is there a balanced conversation or it's more like monologue. If there's a longer monologue meaning the person is probably not interested who came on the call or they're probably looking at some other platforms and not very serious about yours. So engagement metric and then understanding you are not just giving the monologue. These kind of things really matter for sales conversations and someone who is in this role and they are trying to convince a lot of clients from their pitch, be it a product demo, be it just a normal discussion, the engagement score is something that we feel like is an important metric. On top of that, we believe all these metrics are good when you are assessing a call, individual call. But we also advocate these insights for leaders, for company executives to look at and see in an organization where probably 20, 40 salespeople are having daily conversations, over a quarter or even a year So that way they are able to see most mentioned competitors or product features, they appear in that trend with their sentiment, clarity, engagement score and all those metrics we talked about. And that makes them decide whether the platform is good, what kind of product features are being talked about a lot in their conversations. And this helps them to make decisions on products, on marketing campaigns, how to position their product, how to make more kind of like working organization from frontline manager's perspective not like working in silos. Sometimes people feel like sales product and marketing, they're working in silos. So these metrics, these insights and aggregated trends help organizations to make one voice to the customer, which is essential for a company for their success for sure.

- Yeah. You actually kind of created a good segue to one of my next questions. How can Conversational NLP or platform like yours help marketing? So we spoke a lot about sales and sales training so far and on the marketing side you stated, you know, there's a opportunity to break the silos between the two, the proverbial sales and the marketing alignment that is always elusive in a lot of organizations. So any other thoughts? I mean, I can think about competitive intel for example, but you know, what do you see in your conversations with marketers? Where do they see most of the value?

- Sure, Emil. So one of the things we saw early on when we started speaking with sales folks and showcasing the platform was that a lot of other leaders within the organization beyond sales, including marketing and product, were very interested in trying to understand what goes on between a prospect and a sales rep. They, until now, did not have a good understanding of that. They used to rely on anecdotal recollection. So they would speak with some reps who would then try and remember what the client was saying. So they would get this sparse information around what's going on in those conversations. We believe that sales conversation is your direct link from the market to understand how the market perceives your product and that could be a very good way to run experiments. You can pitch a few features that you haven't even launched yet and see how the client is responding. You can mention a few names that you think you're partnering with that they're using and try and see how the client is responding to that. Those things go a long way and try and validate something. If you were to run an experiment, maybe do some surveys from people who might not necessarily be your ICP to get a sense of where you should steer your ship marketing wise or product-wise, you would still get some noise. Obviously, we're not replacing that, but a good compliment of that is really speaking with someone who's sitting across the table with a rep, spending their 30, 60 minute over a few calls, and then telling you exactly what their pain points are and then reacting to some of the positioning statements that the rep is making. Now being able to capture those regular reactions and then make conclusions out of that has not been possible so far. And the kind of conclusions we are talking about, you mentioned a little bit about competitions. So we mentioned we capture not just unlike the competitive mentions but also the sentiment associated with it, the clarity associated with it. Beyond that, we are able to capture product features, which are not just important for the product guys, but market guys as well. The marketing team can understand which features should I market more, which features click and resonate more? You can also practice about anything else you think. So some of our clients are able to capture any trackers, any word that you want to mention in a pitch and then see how the client is responding. This helps you do like an AP testing within your positioning statements, see the reaction and maybe tweak your messaging across. So marketing teams for the first time have had this chance to get direct feedback from customers around anything they actually fancy to get feedback on and then they can incorporate that and see if it's resonating more or less and continue to do that experiment. That wasn't something that was possible before, but that's been helping sales marketing teams a lot.

- I got it. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks. Well, you know, before we wrap up, I just wanna ask a question about the future. Because we talked a lot about the current states, we talked a little bit about what people used to do in the past. Obviously, there's been a lot of development recently and just in general NLP and AI are becoming more and more sophisticated, so that's opening more doors to doing more creative analysis of sales conversations and other areas. So how do you see the future in your area? Where will Conversational NLP for sales enablement go from here? Maybe both of you can comment or each whatever, whichever one of you has more thoughts on this, but I'm really curious to hear your thoughts.

- Sure, sure. Yeah, this is something we would would want to talk about in general because being in this business for more than two years now we have the perspective of when we started we have seen the market, and then now it's changing. And of course in next five to 10 years conversationally, I will further evolve and help businesses to capture more clients and have more efficiencies in their sales operations, Emil. When we started, I will take two parts to this question, and on business side and then as well as on technology side. On business side, when we started two years ago, we heard a lot about like, "Oh, we want to record a conversation, is our client okay with that?" And what kind of insights would that be? if you are new to the market, if you're new to this kind of technology, you always question would that work, would that not? In today's involvement, we are seeing like sales people, they're adopting this technology and they are so comfortable with that, that every time there's a fundraiser, every time the company is expanding their sales team, they need such tools. So it's the market awareness that's increasing and people want to adopt such solutions because now it's becoming competitive and because these solutions are helping them a lot in their sales operations, it's literally no brainer for them that it should be there or not. It's there, what kind of platforms do they need? That's the question and that's what they explore in the market. And as we continue to see like further, all the reservations about recording, about adopting such technologies these days, clients even ask the companies, can you send me this recording? We want this because we want to discuss with our teams as well. On top of recordings, if they get the insights right away, the notes that they discuss for an hour or so, that's making their life much easier and saving a lot of time. So from business side, it's making them efficient, saving a lot of time for them. And on technology side of course, things have changed a lot, and Chhavi can share more on our technology side, but it looks like when we started things were like, okay, you want to capture sentiment, you want to capture engagement. Those metrics might be directionally correct, but now the accuracy on transcription on these metrics are getting to a point where it's more than 95%, 98%. Like Conversational NLP in my opinion, is going to go a long way where the voice technology is not being just able to give you some metrics, it's gonna be fully automated where voice commands will be helping any salesperson, marketing leaders, product leaders to get their work done within, not even within minutes, within seconds. So that's the kind of efficiency we foresee from such platforms. I'd like Chhavi to talk more on both the fronts.

- No, great answer, Shilpa. I don't have much to add to that except for the fact that tech-wise, this is a very dynamic piece. When we started the capability that of technology was limited compared to what it is today and it's just been a couple years. So I'm guessing over the next few years, we are gonna start seeing more and more measurements happening around conversations. So we will be able to much more accurately capture more behavioral data related to a call and then provide more actionable insights. Now these are two very big areas. Being able to capture the nuances of conversation and then being able to provide actionable insights to the salesperson and the sales team overall is something we think is gonna become more of a competitive advantage as we go forward. And so the speed, the accuracy, all of that technically is gonna go up. We also see this area expanding beyond sales business-wise. So today we've seen from customer service before, we have sales, customer success marketing increasingly, we're gonna start seeing on the product side, on some of the other areas as well, where more and more companies will start applying this thing internally, externally, to try and capture those conversations. A lot of information these days discussed during meetings is dissipated into thin air if you don't record that. And with more and more people working remotely, it's becoming much more important to be able to capture those things, and analyze and be able to be on top of everything that's discussed. So this is only going to accelerate as we go to the next few years. Again, we are gonna start seeing more and more use case within different organizations in the future.

- Yeah, thank you very much for both of your thoughts on the future. And I guess, yeah, I mean, it's an exciting time to be part of that because it's growing very fast and adoption is increasing. I think people are starting to understand more and more how it works. Sales are also for good or bad, have moved more virtual and are kind of staying in that mold even after the pandemic. So you know, it actually is easier to do that now than even three, four years ago. Not just because there's more technology, but because people are having more of these sales calls that way. So it's great to hear. Thank you very much both of you. I really appreciate your time. It was great to host you. I'm super excited to have had my first episode with multiple guests and again, thank you. I look forward to hosting you maybe in the future on another episode, but I really appreciate you joining me today.

- Thank you so much, Emil. It's a pleasure.

- Thanks for having us. Thank you.

- Thank you. Bye-bye.

- Bye.