Find out What a Webcomic, Crypto, and a Product Release Have in Common in Hero Volume 1

Aaron Sun Avatar photo

Release marketing is ripe for change. Sharing the granular details of what is new in a technology company’s software is essential, and in many cases a legal obligation. But does that mean it has to be boring? At Vivun, we want to break the mold with how we talk about our product evolution. Along with major releases, we are pursuing a creative narrative to galvanize PreSales teams and tell a story so powerfully, its artistic merit can stand alone.

Introducing Hero Volume 1: An AI Product Story

This is a new way to launch products and share how our software delivers value. In the crowded digital world of news, everyone is fighting for attention. This meant we had to go far beyond release notes and traditional feature marketing to create something authentic and timeless.

As an AI-first company, it’s only natural for Vivun to launch our first major product story about how we amplify the strategic impact of PreSales through the power of data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in Hero Volume 1. AI is the foundation for our PreSales Intel and Ops platform, known as PSIOps™. It’s been a focus since day one and underpins everything we do.

The Hero Volume 1 product release highlights include:

  • PreSales Ontology, the backbone of our AI/ML.
  • An evolved Hero Score, the always-improving measure of a deal’s technical strength.
  • Calendar Intelligence, a frictionless way to capture team work and metrics.
  • Product Gap Analysis, which aggregates deal-specific product feedback on the fly.
  • Product Gap Clustering, a faster path to market insights and impactful prioritization.

We built a rich narrative for the release in the first volume of The Hero Chronicles, a webcomic designed to immerse the reader in a parallel world that illustrates what our software can do for PreSales professionals and their companies. Our core product, Hero by Vivun®, is a reference to the incredible efforts of our users and the superpowers Vivun invokes. So a comic-themed product story felt appropriate. 

Our leadership team also has a passion for visual art and design and the desire to build a sequential narrative that rides shotgun with our technology. What’s more, one of Vivun’s top cultural values is to “Be Different.” Making branded swag available along with a release is nothing new, and we wanted to take this a step further in launching one-of-a-kind shoes and a non-fungible token (NFT). Given the incredible talent of the project artist, 17th & Oak–who has worked with the likes of Disney and Lucasfilm–we wanted to make his work available to the world in the form of collectible merchandise. We’ll donate 100% of the NFT proceeds to Girls Who Code, a non-profit organization committed to closing the gender gap in technology.

Technology highlights

A product release wouldn’t be possible without some meaty new capabilities. While our high-velocity engineering team always delivers, the new AI capabilities we are bringing to the market have a large thumbprint from Vivun’s Chief Data Scientist, Joe Miller, PhD. One of the core areas he is developing is a PreSales Ontology which captures the collective intelligence of the PreSales industry and powers Vivun’s AI engine to be explainable, relatable, and actionable for our customers. We use Natural Language Generation (NLG) to express our AI insights in words that anyone can review and react to at any given point in time. This is a critical component in making the intelligence easy to understand and an immediate way to inform better decision making for every team member.

A Simplified Representation of Vivun’s PreSales Ontology

Vivun’s Hero Score embodies these methods to influence the actions a team takes on any given deal. This is the most direct way to drive impact on revenue, operations, and product innovation over time. It uses a blended approach of rules-based expertise and a self-learning Bayesian Network to calculate a deal’s likelihood to be won from a technical perspective. Each score is paired with a description for how a deal is ranking, revealing risks and opportunities to change the outcome.

Calendar Intelligence is one of the ways we seamlessly capture the PreSales data that drives team metrics, analytics and ultimately identifies what leads a deal to closed-won. This is a passive, user-friendly way for team members to track their work. It’s integrated into their calendars and uses Machine Learning to determine if a recurring event is already linked to an opportunity in Hero, who is on the event, which deliverables are assigned, and who is the team working the deal. Calendar Intelligence uses an ML technique called TF-IDF(for names, attendees, event details) to automatically pair scheduled events with the work on respective sales opportunities.

Calendar

Another core data point for determining the technical success of a deal is the buyer’s product-fit. PreSales professionals have a clearer line of sight on this than anyone else. When deals are worked, shortcomings are identified in the product and captured on the sales Opportunity record. Product Gap Analysis makes these deal inputs actionable by applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) to the feedback and surfacing existing Product Gaps for faster aggregation and fewer duplicates.

On the other end of the mountain of incoming data from the field, there will always be new requests that are not a perfect match for previously reported Gaps. Whether it’s the PreSales management, or someone from the Product team, someone is responsible for making sense of this large, qualitative dataset. This is where Product Gap Clustering comes into play. Time to product insights is accelerated with machine learning algorithms for clustering. Patterns and trends emerge from the field data when feedback is bubbled up for real-time review, prioritization, and development. This speeds up the pace of innovation and the ability to meet buyer’s needs and unlock revenue.

Clusters

Just the beginning

When it comes to AI-driven innovation, you can always expect more from Vivun. Our Product and Engineering organizations are gaining momentum every day. The Vivun PreSales team is using Hero’s capabilities to identify what our buyers and customers need today and tomorrow, not yesterday. So dive into Hero Volume 1. Get ready for Volume 2 and beyond.

Check out the full Product Story, and join the AI-powered PreSales revolution.

Aaron Sun Avatar photo August 18, 2021