Simi
What’s the issue?
Current sales cycles take tons of touch points, in depth product knowledge, curated demos, and customer customer education. That's a lot for just sales to tackle. Simi brings top 1% product knowledge & technical expertise for your industry into every customer interaction, but don't worry sales. You still get to close the deal how you want to!
What was my impact?
MVP Designs, Pitch Deck, & Branding leading to 3 investor due diligence process (fully completed)! But alas we did not close pre-seed funding, with many big competitors releasing similar products at the same time, it increased investor risk.
Team
Founding Product Designer
CEO - Founder
CTO
Contract ML Team
Timeline
Q1: Understand the customer
Q2: Define & Design MVP
Q3: Develop pitch deck
Why can sales take so long?
Product education
Niche B2B companies have learning curves depending on the customer. Taking the time to explain what a product does can be multiple interactions & involve technical stakeholders.
Customer context
Customers want to know how will this work for them? Often this means demos... more demos... & a few more demos.
Lots of touchpoints across tools
Managing complex cycles takes many different tools.
What are key points in the cycle?
Identifying the problem to solve
Exploring solutions & gather context
Defining what's relevant to them
Creating alignment between the users, business, and product
Important to users
Quickly gain context to make a decision on a particular product
Time to customer decision
Important to the business
Closing deals with fewer touchpoints and costs
Average cost to close deal
Important for the product
Properly explaining how the product is valuable to the customer
Quality of customer interactions
How did we get set these metrics?
Talking with founders and executives on what their biggest pain points are
Talking with customers about the paint points of buying B2B products
Talking with marketers to understand their difficulties with being involved in sales
Leadership needs to cut costs to close deals
With so many tools, budgets are inflated
Executives kept reiterating how much they were currently spending on tooling and how much time from internal teams is dedicated to sales... its just not sustainable or scalable.
Integration is still key
Even with inflated budgets, new tooling is a gamble. Executives were clear that integrating initially would be easier buy-in and setup for their companies.
What's the opportunity?
Simi can cut cost on budgets
Simi can free up time from teams
Simi can become infrastructure, not just a feature
Meeting buyers & sales people where they are at
Designed for different industries, products, & individuals
Depending on the buyer and industry, some prefer phone calls whilst other prefer purely digital formats. But all of them require clear communication and easily referenced deliverables after each interaction
What does this mean for Simi?
Simi needs to be flexible & modular to each use case
Need a core knowledge of interactions across modalities
Sales & buyers should be able to work across modalities
A multimodal framework powered by a central intelligence
Web Demo
Technical Conversations
Web demo mode is for customer looking for specific context to their use case. This mode can provide instant demo's across any content.
Web Chat
Fast access to knowledge
Web chat is meant to integrate easily into an existing website or product to provide technical expertise and education.
Mobile Call
Convenient on-the-go interactions
A call is the easiest way for buyers to find the time to get stuff done. Product knowledge can be conveyed by Simi on a call.
Investor conversations & MVP devlopment limitations
MVP Build
Beta testing the core functions
With a solid direction of where we were going, the CTO built out core functionality for the chat, demo modes. We started testing with our early adopters!
Pitch Deck
Framing our product offering
I worked on building a strong framing around the products value prop, ip/moat, as well as the brand. This had to resonate not just with the product, but the CEO as well.
Investor Conversations
Supporting the CEO in one off asks
As investor due diligence began, we were flooded with asks for specific feature demo's, prototypes, and diagrams for how our systems worked. I made them as needed!
What did we learn from all this?
Modality, functionality, and UI are disregarded if the intelligence is not there... But they can open the door for you!
Framing has to be delivered not just by the CEO, but by every early hire. People invest in the team over the product.
Seeing is believing, if you can prototype it or even better build it, people will follow your vision.
Next Case Study: Apploi
