Part 2: How to sell AI software to Customer Experience Teams

Help Us Buy Your Software

Welcome back, or to, a post about selling Generative AI software to CX teams. I encourage you to check out Part 1 of the post, in which I talked about some key elements to have in mind when attracting CX customers. Those ideas included:

• Showing off your expertise in AI and CX
• Market education as a way to attract buyers
• Historical context to help you sell

In Part 2, I'm going to provide practical advice to help you close deals with CX teams and create fanatical customers by adding value and solving problems. In an ideal world, departments from product to finance to engineering love your solution as much as CX does. Creating cross-functional value creates stickiness for your product and opens the door to future expansion and improved margins.

Time to Value As Your Secret Weapon

Reducing the time to value is the most important hurdle to get your foot in the door and will show your CX buyer that you understand their business. This will lead to more conversations, more demos, and more signed contracts.

Think about buying and implementing traditional software like Salesforce: the time from when you begin paying to realizing value can be painstakingly long. Based on this history and the competitive landscape of Generative AI, it's crucial to bring real value to your buyer as quickly as possible or you risk losing their attention.

Luckily, Generative AI demos that I've seen can show value in a flash! Once you have a prospect on your site, here are few examples of how you can immediately show your platform's value:

• Provide a topical categorization of customer interactions
• Create a categorical knowledge base showcasing typical customer questions and answers
• Show a report that categorizes volume trends over time, bonus points for segmenting their customers
• Estimate the quantity of conversations that can be fully or partially solved with your Generative AI solution
• Create a presentation with a summary of conversations showcasing product requests that they could share with Product

Each of these examples is powerful on its own because they're time consuming for a human to create, and likely do not exist in most organizations today. Also, depending on the helpdesk tooling that a team is using, these reports might also be impossible to create today or they only come with an expensive upsell. The key is to think about ways to prove to your buyer that you understand them.

Consider two alternative approaches to customer acquisition and think about which provides the fastest path to demonstrating value to the customer. One will sound very familiar and the other flips the traditional script on its head:

Option 1: Your prospect visits your site and is met with a “Schedule a demo with our team” link and asked to provide loads of information about their company. You hide pricing. Features aren't really explained. Integrations aren't listed.

Option 2: The prospect is presented with an offer: “Test our tool for free”. They're asked to do a few steps:

Step 1: Choose your helpdesk and authenticate. Step 2: Choose your free report from a list of options Step 3: Receive an email in a few hours with your customized report. Step 4: Offer a follow up call

It's clear that Option 2 is a no-brainer. Instead of requiring your prospect to put in the effort, you flipped the equation in your favor and gave the appearance that the customer won. You gave a free report to get access to a captive customer, an integration into their helpdesk, and something to speak about on the first call. Plus, you already know everything about their CX interactions and their business. You can create highly accurate estimates about how much automation you can drive for them, and what type of help they really need. On top of that, you have unlimited content to use in highly-targeted marketing campaigns if the prospect doesn't purchase right away.

Too many companies try to force customers through a process designed for the company and not the customer. If you flip the traditional script, you'll stand out.

Integrations Must be Robust & Simple

A very common reason why CX software projects stall is because integrations aren't immediately available. This can be on the provider or customer end, and when I think about integrations, I think on two dimensions: integrating with SaaS tools already in use and integrations with a company's internal API - which is the holy grail of integrations.

Note: It's best to assume that a CX team does not have the engineering resources readily available to build integrations for your tool. If you begin with this constraint you can work backwards, but working in the other direction is much more challenging.

The first integration, which is a core requirement, is an integration with the customer's existing SaaS tools like a CRM. This could be any platform where the team(s) spend a majority of their day or where they run their processes. Think about tools like Zendesk, Salesforce, Catalyst, etc. Fortunately, these are really common integrations, and you can either build them yourself, or leverage a tool like Merge.dev to gain instant access to 30+ ticket platforms or 20+ CRMs. If you're building it yourself, think about which platform integration will provide the most immediate value. For example, Gorgias speaks directly with Shopify, so you gain value by leveraging pre-built connections. As you scale, think about the build vs buy equation for your business and go with what makes the most sense, and know that at massive scale you'll likely build it yourself.

The next integration is with a company's internal API. Hopefully, their API is robust, fully documented, and accessible to you. Customers using systems like Retool as their backend are likely to fit this profile because they're integrating data and actions with a third party. The reality to prepare for is that your prospects have not built an internal API that meets modern standards, so you'll need to be creative to really add value.

Why Integrations are Necessary

To demonstrate why integrations are necessary, think about a common e-Commerce question: “Where's my shipment?” To answer this, you at least need to know if an order was shipped or not. The best information would be a tracking status, tracking link, and knowing if the order is late or on time. An unshipped order that's missing tracking information is a liability because without a true integration you'll need a human to step in to do the analysis. In cases like this, your tool can still provide value, such as flagging inquiries about late shipments, but you'll need to be creative to show the value.

Read/write access to your customer's systems allow you to make updates in their system, provide real-time answers, log order issues, and perform the same actions that a human can inside of the system. On top of that, you can create new solutions, such as filling out an escalation form or automatically flagging problematic orders before customers do. I think it's important to generate creative ways to get to this state, but do not allow it to restrict the value you demonstrate for the customer. Instead, potentially think about it as a v2 implementation and take what you can get for v1.

The quality and coverage of your integrations have a large impact on the quality of your end product in your customer's eyes. Aiming to make this simple for CX teams without engineering resources should be your goal. This doesn't mean paying the integration cost, but it could mean connecting customers with specialized resources to write the code or CX consultants.

Cross-Functional Wins

One of the reasons why CX is not as well funded as other divisions is because showing the value of our work can be challenging. This is why it's crucial to think cross-functionally when selling CX software so that you create champions outside of CX.

Most modern tech companies lead with Product and Engineering, and they're well-funded teams and all major changes run through those organizations. With that in mind, selling your solution horizontally to a prospect can help you gain traction. You might even experience that budgetary and integration challenges magically disappear if you can prove real value to these teams. It might even be possible to attract customers by targeting non-CX employees who see the value in better interactions with their CX team.

Here are some common touchpoints between CX and Product/Engineering along with ideas on how this adds value.

• Track customer issues or complaints and highlight when something is fixed. This creates a consolidated report which saves time and closes the loop.
• Tie this into the issue tracking system like Jira or Linear so that there's real-time information about issues
• Show the differences in retention for a customer who interacts with CX vs the cohort who doesn't, or the retention for a customer who experienced a specific issue. This helps to show CX's value and can earmark more resources for bug fixing.

Regardless of which approach you take, earning cross-functional commitment greases the wheels to help a deal move along. Working on this early in the deal cycle can help enormously if you're getting stuck.

Product Differentiation - Building Platforms vs Features

As you might expect at the start of the Generative AI industry, it's common to see very narrow use-cases emerge. The early tools are really one-off features that do something simple, like edit an email. A challenge you'll face is that features like this are already being incorporated into platforms like Gmail. As you're building, I encourage you to think about whether your work will easily become a feature within a larger platform, or will this be a valuable addition to your customers as a platform on its own.

To illustrate this, I'll provide an example in the Workforce Management (WFM) space. WFM tools are used by CX teams to perform volume forecasting, agent scheduling, tracking work, and reporting for large teams to help ensure a very high level of service. WFM tools usually replace spreadsheets or complicated Erlang formulas. A companion tool for WFM tools are time clocks for tracking hours. Typically they are used to run payroll and for reporting purposes. In my experience, many WFM tools don't focus on adding a timeclock feature, but rely on integrations. This lets customers spend money on another tool, leaving money on the table and making room for competitors to win more customers.

Instead of this, I would encourage WFM platforms to build or buy this tooling, charge half as much as the solution they're replacing, earn more ARR, and save their customers money. In the next section about generating an ROI, think about this example. I encourage you to create features that can also be bundled to replace other tools which can make your platform more valuable.

Show Me The ROI

When you're trying to build an ROI use-case at a company, you're like to ask: “do you see value in this tool/data/etc.?” Undoubtedly, you'll receive an answer that starts with a resounding “yes” and, like most animals, ends in a “but”. I intentionally already spoke about showing cross-functional value because it will help you in the sales cycle. It will also help overcome the biggest hurdle in today's environment: the cash outlay.

So if you have cross-functional buy-in and the hurdle of asking for spend, how do you succeed in closing a sale? I think it comes down to showing an ROI in both traditional and non-traditional ways.

The traditional method is showing that spending money on your tool will save more money for the organization than they spend. In this case, the equation involves a time savings component to show that the tool more than pays for itself while demonstrating the cross-functional efficiencies and improvements. As your company matures, you'll have additional data points around quality improvements for the customer's experience such as upselling customers or following up on negative experiences, which are harder to quantify in the early days.

Less traditional ROI calculations involve opportunity cost. So if the team spends less time on their current work, and offloads this to your tool, what can they do in place of that work to add value? Maybe it's doing more volume with fewer people, or creating a new value-add process. Dig into their company objectives and help the customer think of these scenarios to include in the calculation.

Lastly, ask about other expenditures you can help reduce or eliminate. If your customer currently uses an expensive reporting package or plugin, can you replace it? Look for ways like this to earn trust and become important to your customers. Keep the earlier WFM example in mind.

The key to all of the ROI use cases is that you can show real examples because you already integrate with their data. When you have a company's historical data, it is no longer theoretical to tell a CFO that you can automate 30% of the work in an area. You can prove it with reports, and show the quality of the Generative AI. Not only that, you can generate service reports to show the speed today vs the future, and potentially show retention or sales gains from faster replies. This produces magic, which every CFO looks for: Better + Faster + Cheaper = Magic. This might be the only time they get all three!

As your buyer begins to pitch your solution, do not leave it up to them to build this ROI model on their own. Instead, spend the time to develop a template for your prospects and build it with them in Google Sheets - this allows you to see version history and who they share the model with, which signals who needs to approve the spend. This customized approach will feel very special and create a deeper commitment from your prospect. This allows you a degree of control in the pitch and you'll learn what resonates to close a sale. At scale, you'll even be able to provide this to self-service customers!

Congrats on the Deal, Now What?

A signed contract is only as good as the value you generate, which begins with the implementation and acceptance of your solution into a customer's company.

The first step in this journey is to make sure things start off smoothly. I think that there's a great amount of value for a customer to be guided through an implementation. Why's that? Implementing SaaS tools is really a giant change management project which requires planning and lots of precise communication. In most cases, the type of work can be driven by checklists and templated content, here's an example of what I mean:

Let's say that your new client is introducing your tool to their team. By-in-large, this announcement will be met with repetitive objections, and you can help your buyer by generating responses to these FAQs. When we implemented Product Board at a past company, our head of product was provided canned templates for meetings such as language to use in emails, invites, and slides for presenting. This showed lots of value creation for us as the customer, and Product Board knew we had a higher chance of a better implementation. For your early customers you won't have this all in place, but just like your documentation, you'll refine this repository over time with each subsequent implementation.

As you think ahead about “Customer Success” for your company, I want you to keep in mind that it's not about maximizing retention. Retention is an outcome of creating value for your customer. A customer's success should be about continually creating value for your customers through your product, which creates retention.

It's Time to Build

Since I still have your attention I know that you're committed to making or investing in the best Generative AI platform possible, and I'm rooting for you! Here's your checklist of items to consider when launching or iterating on your company. By no means do I think an early stage company can do all of these extremely well, so you might choose to lean heavily into a few areas:

• Educate the market and show off your combined AI and CX expertise.
• This will increase size of the addressable market
• Be human: Lend your customers a hand, learn from and teach them
• Embrace CX's history, respect the challenges, but don't let them stop you
• Earning the trust of the following teams will help close more deals: finance, product, and engineering
• Time to value is your secret weapon; Show the value of your product as quickly as possible by giving to get
• Integrations could be your achilles heel or silver bullet
• Build an ROI and implementation plan for your customer and edit them frequently
• You earn renewals by providing value

Out of everything that I talked about, what do I consider to be the most important? For me, it's undoubtedly bringing great product execution together with a strong desire to solve CX challenges. I believe that if you're in it for the long-haul that you'll make the right product decisions to create a lasting company that can positively impact millions of end customers.

My offer to help

If you're building or investing in an AI platform for CX I would love to see your product, discuss the market, and potentially see how we can work together.

If you're a CX leader considering applying Generative AI I would love to talk about your options and how you can implement a solution.

Ahead of the busy holiday season if you need help implementing an AI platform at your company let's talk!

The easiest way to reach me is via email