Short answer: Anis Bennaceur says buyers' core pain is an empty CRM. Attention fills every field, not just a summary, such as a competitor's contract renewal date heard on a cold call, and he says AI native CRM buyers often switch back to Salesforce.
Watch this answer from Episode 45 (starts at 13:04) · Episode 45 notes and transcript
From Episode 45: Your Pipeline Is Lying to You. This AI Fixes It After Every Sales Call, starting at 13:04.
Jordan Metzner [13:04]: But obviously, you kinda have some experience of, building this into like what you need. I think nobody's CRM is up to date when it was had to be done fully manually. So I think, obviously, like, bringing things in, like, email and all these other things into the CRM was just, the beginning of automation into those flows. You talked about some of your customers, which are, like, some of the leading startups in AI right now. And, not to go into anything confidential, but maybe you can tell us a little bit about like, what was the problem, what was their pain, how did attention come to fill that, and kinda how are they using it to win more deals?
Anis Bennaceur [13:36]: Yeah. Initially, everyone would just come to us with a very simple pain point, which is our CRM is always empty. And it's a nightmare when we need to pull any sorts of reports. Right. That's been the case. Even we see that all the way till today. I spoke yesterday with one of the fastest AI native scale ups at this point. It's like one of the biggest darlings in Silicon Valley. And I could've, talked about I was I actually did mention the agents. I mentioned a lot of things, but the one thing that the buyer really cared about the most was, oh my god. You can fill our Salesforce? Yes. We can. Right? Now we have a lot of buyers who have AI mandates and are looking to be agent agentic solutions and proactive actions and next best steps and automated reporting. But the biggest thing is how do you fill our Salesforce. Right? And that's why people still come to us every single day today.
Jordan Metzner [14:36]: Okay. That's awesome. So and by when you say fill out their Salesforce, that means you're doing deep integration with their mail, calendar, phone, etcetera systems, and then using that with AI so that all those details are then reported directly into the CRM?
Anis Bennaceur [14:53]: Yeah. That's correct. It's not just a summary. Right? You can do a summary, but you'll miss a lot of information. We'll fill every single field in your CRM. Right? And so let's say, hey. I wanna capture the dates of the competitor contract renewal. Right? Boom. It automatically gets captured and put in there. Right? Imagine when your SDR is cold calling, like, one of your prospects, and the prospect responds, hey. We're still in contracts with your competitor for the next six months. The chances of your SDR going in and filling that information are close to zero, but Attention will capture that and automatically distill that and fill your CRM based on that. You wanna know what is their tech stack. You wanna know, information around, like, their spending habits. Anything that you really care about that you wanna store in there, Attention will do that work for you. Right? And there are so many millions of errors and edge cases that can happen that we spend the past three plus years just deeply making sure that things would work there. Obviously, the alternative is you go in and buy an AI native CRM. But every single time I talk to a buyer who used one of these AI native CRMs, they hated it. Right? They end up having a new revenue leader that comes in and says, hey, forget this tool.
Anis Bennaceur [16:11]: I won't name any, but forget this tool. We're actually gonna switch to Salesforce or HubSpot. Right? I've seen that happen over and over again. And so at attention, we don't care about building a CRM. We don't wanna build a new CRM. We wanna focus all of our engineering efforts into building the best possible actions that for your entire team that are more and more insightful and increasingly smarter.
Jordan Metzner [16:37]: That's awesome. Okay. Cool. I think we like kind of hit it over the head a few times here now. That's super cool. It sounds like some of the you mean you're working with some of the best companies. So obviously, that's gotta be pretty fun. And series b also, congratulations. Let's see. Maybe we should jump into the news a little bit, Sam.
