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MB Crosier's avatar

I recently found myself on an AI-avatar-led demo via Hubspot (https://offers.hubspot.com/thank-you/starter-platform-demo), and honestly found it to be a great experience as an end user.

I'm too small of a customer to merit a sales rep's time, but the avatar was helpful, friendly, and directed me to relevant resources (which definitely reflects investment in documentation as mentioned here). 'Fiona' can also pull up demo videos of specific features; not quite an interactive demo, but feels pretty close.

Since I was curious, I also tested what happened when I mentioned having a large team or needing Enterprise features, and the avatar would then ask for my contact info to refer me to a human rep, so it still has an escalation path for 'qualified' leads. I feel like we'll definitely see this more and more; lots of win-wins for both sales teams and users.

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Kyle Poyar's avatar

Wow, super interesting. Didn’t realize folks the size of HubSpot were already doing this.

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MB Crosier's avatar

Yep! And I think with pretty good results :) - from this post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lynnicewolf_impactsummit-aiingtm-marketingleadership-activity-7328900803337814045-65xX

"💥 One demo that blew my mind? 1mind’s “Mindy”, a superhuman AI deployed by HubSpot. She engaged 88% of site visitors, boosted free trials by 78%, and delivered a 25% lift in influenced purchases — all while providing real-time, human-like conversations. "

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WW's avatar

1 question 1 comment: Are people made aware up front that they are interacting with AI instead of a human? Subtle cues exist/occur with live conversations during lead qualification, in addition to tremendous learning (for humans:). At this point, I wouldn't outsource the opportunity qualification moment to AI.

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Kyle Poyar's avatar

It’s pretty clear it’s a bot (at least in RB2Bs case)

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Ryan Mullins's avatar

Really like this case study. Thanks for sharing!

I’m with you AI augmentation is still the focus for B2B sales. Seems like as soon as you need to coordinate cross-talk within the buyer, an AI model would stumble. But that’s just me speaking from my ivory tower ;)

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Kyle Poyar's avatar

Totally. This use case is a “tweener” where it already isn’t a good use of time for sales to be working with <$100 accounts, but where those accounts have questions and could eventually grow

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School of SDR's avatar

Interesting experiment. Appreciate Adam for always pushing the limits on improving revenue per employee metric.

AI sales is all good for transactional sales provide one person spends reviewing and improving the response (real evals aka QA and RL) and have great documentation.

Surprising thing we learned during AI deployment is how messy internal documentation is.

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Tjitte Joosten's avatar

Think the biggest upside as a customer here is speed. I hate it when I need to schedule a demo for next week only to go through someone's pitch rather than my questions.

If I can do it on the spot and get started, that's real upside for me as a buyer.

Hopefully, that'll allow me to chat with more capable and senior people when a matter needs to get escalated.

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