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Transcript

Matt Darrow, CEO, Vivun

I'm Matt Darrow. I'm the cofounder and CEO of Vivun. We've raised over a hundred and thirty million dollars from Accel, Menlo, SalesforceVentures.

Our customers are enterprises that you guys know in theaudience, ADP, Snowflake, Dayforce, DocuSign, and we built the world's first AIsales engineer to give 24/7 coverage to your entire go to market team. So before we get to the demo, I had one simple question for everybody in the audience out there, which is, well, what would happen if you took every AE that you work with and gave them access to your best SE, but that SE was always available?Well, a few things would happen.

Your ramp time would collapse, and you get a whole lot more deals done, a lot faster too. So why aren't you doing that? Well, you're not doing that because it's insanely expensive, and it's impossible to find that many great SEs out there.

But with our AISE, those outcomes can still be possible just through a radically different approach. So in the next ten minutes, you're gonna see how Kevin, an account executive, can move faster on his own and be wildly successful by partnering with an AISE, a virtual teammate.

Working with Ava, our AISE, is like working with your best team member, except Ava is always available. And you onboard Ava like you onboard a new hire.

And because Ava knows the job that she was hired to do to bea sales engineer, she knows what she wants to learn about your company, yourproducts, your competition, your customers. In this case, doing good discovery,a cornerstone of what great sales engineers bring to the table.

And Ava works like a human team member by being able to access the same set of information, from your CRM systems like Salesforce to collaboration tools like Slack to email, Google, Microsoft, Google Drive, being able to tap into your conversations through Zoom, Gong, Chorus. All these aspects that are available to a human are available to Ava.

And also good old fashioned documentation. So if I'm going to teach Ava about what is it like to do great discovery, in this case at Vivun,I can also just give her a file.

And just like a human onboards, she's gonna review this information and tell me what she's learned. And the whole point there is that Ican course correct her knowledge and her understanding.

In this case, what does it mean to do phenomenal discovery at Vivun? The questions that we like to ask, the pain that we're searching for,And she takes all of this information that she's learning, and she appends itto her knowledge. This is one of the most important breakthroughs.

And coming off of the last session, IP that Vivun has brought to the table is that we have built the brain. The large language models are phenomenal tools, but that not that is not the brain that helps an agent understand how to do the job of a professional, and that's what we've codified at Vivun. We know more about sales engineering than anybody else on the planet.

We've taken that knowledge to build a brain for an agent that can adapt and learn and apply the skills of being a sales engineer in the context of your organization. And the best part is this agent is always a master at their topics.

They never forget, and they can rapidly learn and outperform any human out there. So now let's go back and get to work with Kevin.

So Kevin, just like any other account executive on the sales team, now has access to tap into this incredible new team member, and my best new team member is gonna be proactive and help me out. In this case, Kevin's got a lot going on.

A couple meetings coming up on the calendar like this important demo with Hooli. So the first thing that Ava is going to do is just to get me prepped.

Because if we're all a little bit clear with ourselves,Kevin probably did do the prep and the research that he was supposed to do before getting on the call. So who are we talking to? What does this company do? Who do they sell to? What's up in the news? What have they been talking about recently? But most importantly, because Ava has that brain and that point of view of doing the SE job, she knows what ought to be done in this situation.

In this case, well, hey, Kevin. We should be collaborating on the demo and the story that we're gonna tell to get our point across.

So proactively guiding me along the way. And because Ava has already tapped into all the prior details for Hooli, the emails that were sent,the external Slack channel that was connected, all the prior call recordings from Zoom and Gong and Chorus and all these other providers, she also knows,well, hey, hold on. There's actually a couple things that this customer needs that our products and services don't do.

And she knows that because she has a masterful understanding of the products and services that she was trained on and applying that with her knowledge in the use case of being an SE. So she's teeing these up for Kevin.

Says, hey. Before we roll into this pitch in this demo,there's certain things that are really important that we don't do.

So what do we wanna do about that? How do we partner to make this the best session possible? We can either sell around them, we could ignore it, pretend they never existed.

Or in this case, Kevin's actually smart enough to know that this first gap is kind of a big deal. And if we don't proactively address it,we're probably gonna not move this deal forward.

So Ava 's going to take all of this into account and do the work. Now you could go to OpenAI and ask a general LLM to build me a demo script, and you will get something amazingly generic and not very useful at all.

But Ava is taking everything that she was trained on for your company as well as that knowledge of being an SE and saying, here's how weland the key points. These are the stories that we wanna tell.

And for every single story, here's what we're gonna show,say, and do, what we're gonna ask, the relevant customer stories, the competitive traps that we're gonna lay. And we're not gonna stop with just Ava getting Kevin ready for the call.

She's gonna do the work that's required to have Kevin have the call. In this case, take this and just turn it into the final asset for the customer.

Build me the actual presentation that I'm going to use in this situation. And this collection of slides had never existed before with all the content and the context and the talking points, as well as the relevant areas of the product to highlight.

And when things change, for instance, this meeting with Hooli, the CEO is now going to attend, Ava also has a point of view that based on that new stakeholder well, actually, this presentation is no longer relevant. Because a C-level person is in attendance, it probably should be less technical and more focused on the outcomes, and that's okay.

She can proactively help with that to take all of this and completely turn it on its head because she has a point of view on how do you make it relevant for that type of audience because of her expertise of being a sales engineer. In this case, customer stories are gonna have the highest impact.

And because Ava is on every single deal and every single interaction, she knows all the prior solutions, all the prior use cases, all the prior customer stories to know that, actually, these are the most relevant that we should highlight. So let's make this whole presentation about how we've helped similar customers completely change the output and the dynamic and then have a great way to walk into this session.

Lastly, she also knows what we haven't done yet. These are the core discovery questions that Kevin still needs to ask so we can be building a really, really strong sales use case to ultimately drive this deal home ahead of our competition and ultimately hold the line on discounting when it comes to procurement.

Now I wanna flash forward you guys three days into thefuture. So Kevin took all those assets, got on the call, he delivered thatamazing presentation, we learned so much from the customer because we asked allthe right discovery, so now what? Well, now when Kevin goes with his cup of coffee to sit and work with Ava, there's something else that is at his footstepfor us to review.

Every single salesperson at every single company, at the end of the day, their job is to figure out what is the right solution for this customer. How do I take what they need with what we offer and find that amazing intersection that allows them to select us over anybody else? Now completely unprompted, and that's so critical for agentic AI.

You don't have to tell this agent what work to do because she knows what work ought to be done, and she knows that she should be building the solution for Kevin. And the solution is why you pay an SE $300,000-$500,000a year because it's that masterful understanding of taking the customer's goals and challenges, understanding their actual technical requirements of what they need to have happen, and then giving the right recommendation of not only what products that they should be using, but positioned perfectly for how we're going to solve their pain.

And because of all the great information Ava has, she also knows the proof points. What are the right testimonials and case studies? And if there are product gaps still outstanding, how are we positioning and selling around those to ensure that this deal can get done and this customer can be successful? And while that is so much meat of information in the crux of every sales campaign, There's also simple things that Ava can help Kevin with too.

Say an email comes in ad hoc at the finish line from someone in IT that just wants to know, how does our Jira integration work? These questions always come up at the finish line. Well, Kevin could just do this on his own.

He doesn't need to schedule a call. He doesn't need to get somebody else out there.

And the best part is all of this information and all of this knowledge is now memorialized in what Ava knows. So when this deal closes, all of this information can be accessed by the post sales team, services, and customer success.

All of those herky jerky handoffs, the value points lost in translation, potentially even understanding what was oversold and by whom and what are the key risks to the deal, all of this is now completely taken care of.

So that was a very, very brief ten minutes, and we're barely scratching the surface for all of the things that our AISE can do for your entire go to market team.

But if I go back to the very, very first question that I asked, which was, well, what would happen if an SE could support every single person in your go-to-market, from your SDR to your AEs to your SEs themselvesand even your CSMs? Well, everybody's ramp time would diminish and vanish, andthey would all move a lot faster and independently on their own.

We hope that you wanna carry this conversation forward with us at Vivun who have built the brain of the sales engineer, something that onlywe could accomplish and put that power in your hands to give you a uniquecompetitive advantage in your market. I welcome you to go to Vivun.com/aise atthe end of today's call and the end of this week and the fantastic summit and get in touch with our team.

And we can go ahead and carry the conversation forward.Julia, I know I'm out of time for the very brief demo.

I hope we brought the energy here too. And for all the folks out there as well, I will be on the panel tomorrow talking about how do you apply these agentic tools in general to your full go to market stack.

We're deploying agents everywhere at Vivun from top of the funnel SDR functions to our own use of Ava as our own AISE, to even things that we're doing on the recruiting side, legal side, and support side. So, I welcome you to join me on that conversation as well.

And, Julia, as always, thanks for having me.

Julia Nimchinski, CEO, HardSkill Exchange

Thanks so much, Matt. Such a great demo.

We are huge fans of what you're building over there at Vivun.I’ve got some questions pre-submitted by the community. And, I guess one fromme, you notice we kinda upped our game with the speakers this time.

We've got Thomas Dingus, one of the leading venture capitalists. And one of his points, in almost all of his presentations, thepoint that people don't like to bring up, but, the ROI, the ultimate ROI of ofAI is basically human replacement.

So how do you see Vivun coming, you know, into play given this trend? Because last year was kind of a year of experimentation. This year,people are trying to get more tangible ROI on AI.

What are you seeing?

Matt Darrow

Yeah. I'll answer this in a a few ways.

First, very directly, that is the promise and the premise ofLLMs and GenAI. I think that's what's so different about this cycle in tech versus going from perpetual licenses to cloud is like, okay.

This is like a delivery mechanism or going from desktop to mobile is a user interface mechanism. What GenAI is all about is replacing what we do as humans and knowledge workers.

I wrote this piece previously that had a really simple two-bytwo matrix that helped you understand if you or your role was in the danger zone, where the y axis was simply, the complexity of your job and the x axis was the number of live interactions you had with other humans. And if you wereat the sort of top right quadrant, you were one of the safer roles.

But if you were in the bottom left, right, you were kinda gone yesterday. And I think that's the best way to think about it is that AI is ultimately here to disrupt so much of this knowledge work that we do as humans,and the severity that's gonna have an impact on your role is really where yousit on that matrix.

So for us, bringing something like this to market, what we found from, like, a CRO seat, the value is actually very clearly in speed,velocity, independence. That's what they want.

Right? The CFO gives them, you know, sort of a bucket of headcount money to go figure out how to hit the number, and they're like,great. How do I just put the best people on all the deals and do them as fast as possible? Right? That's what they want.

Now I will say when projects like this get funded, it happens two ways. Either an IT organization has an AI fund that they're using for strategic experimentation, or that CRO is going to the CFO, and the case that they're making is how not investing in the next set of hires is how thisis going to be funded.

And that's exactly the conversations that are going down and how the ROI of these projects are being sold because that is very much, where where all of this, is headed in a big way.

Julia Nimchinski

One of the questions that really resonated from our community here is, which aspects of sales engineering can't AI replace?

Matt Darrow

Oh, man. You know, there there's a lot of and even if I think about that complexity grid, the things that AI is phenomenal at are all the detailed nuances of the role of the knowledge of the role.

So building incredible solutions, answering technical questions, come up with compelling story lines, all of that stuff like AI, man,that's great at it. The things that are hard is when you and I go see each other in person.

And, like, at the end of the day, people are gonna go put projects on the line because they know that they're gonna be supported with the right people that they are gonna be made successful with. And so much of the SErole is also deeply based on trust of how this is all gonna work.

And I think those areas are really still human dependent.Now I will say, and how we see customers drive this adoption, every business has these commercial high volume segments of the market where nobody's gettingany SE love to begin with.

Those are phenomenal starting points. And as you move up the chain into enterprise strategic major accounts, you're normally talking about taking 60-80% of the work off of somebody's plate so they can do the things that AI isn't great at with a lot of those live political human-basedinteractions.

Julia Nimchinski

Love it. Another question here. How does Vivun quantify presales revenue impact?

Matt Darrow

Oh, man. Well, that's that's like we should spend, like,another thirty minutes on that. Like, here's a couple of things that come to mind. Like, the normal the basic, bottom of the pyramid of need is, revenue assignment. So, how many deals did you work that closed? I I always kinda hated that one for for actually driving strategic decisions on because it was so basic. You don't know what the individuals are doing.

So I think better metrics to actually figuring out the health and the, sort of the power of your SE team are more so things like deal lift. So that's where, hey, Julia, you tapped me into a deal. It was initially forecasted at$150k, and we close it for $500k.

And that's the that's the area that you really understand how healthy this technical team is doing because the better they are at solutioning, objection handling, competitive trap lane, that's what's gonna help you sell the right products and services, defend your price against discounting, and beat your competition too. So those types of KPIs and metrics are a much better health of the system.

And I'll give you the second one. The second one is velocity.

Every SE organization out there should be held accountable to how quickly deals move through the funnel because every single rep independent. Jarod [Vivun CMO] and I joke about sort of a sprinter at Nike with a big parachute on their back.

That's what happens for great reps. Right? They're bringing the rest of the organization with them, and this is something that an AI Sales Engineer can massively accelerate because you can give all that independence directly to these folks so they can move so much faster on their own.

So, basically, everybody out there needs to making sure,well, what deals are the SEs closing? Fine. But the things that you really need to be understanding are things like deal lift and velocity, and those are the most important impact points.

Julia Nimchinski

Last question, Matt. What are you most excited about when it comes to your road map for 2025, and how do you compare it to all the other Vivun competitors and alternatives? What's your thinking here?

Matt Darrow

Yeah. Well, I I think, the the number one thing that I'm most excited about is how we've really looked at our AI Sales Engineer as doing the complete role of a sales engineer.

So not doing point solutions that they might do, like research over here, competitive understanding here, filling out an RFP over here. We've really built Ava as the ability to do the full role and to sit side by side with anybody in GTM to help them out.

And that's also what makes us different. So part two of your question.

But to the technical bit of what makes it different is we've built the brain that allows us to actually have our agent do the work. And anybody out there that's trying to build agents that's relying on the LLM to be the brain, just not gonna work.

And I think that's the big area that we bring massive differentiation as well.

Julia Nimchinski

Thank you so much, Matt. Where should our people go? Could you share the research you're referring to? Will be I don't know. Will will be replaced? How do I know?

Matt Darrow

Oh, for this? Well, there's a lot that we write about on this topic. There's so much content that we have.

Again, going to Vivun.com, even vivun.com/aise, our resource center. Follow me on LinkedIn.

Follow our company, Vivun, on LinkedIn. We're always doing interviews on this topic because it's this brave world that people's roles are vastly changing because their roles and responsibilities are shifting in big ways.

And we're always interviewing leaders in sales and sales engineering and customer success on these topics as we're working through this transformation with them.

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