Why buyer intelligence is the missing piece in sales intelligence

About Humantic AI

Amarpreet: With Humantic AI, we help sales teams truly know their buyers before they walk into any meeting, before they interact with someone, and before they send an email. Our goal is to help them understand their prospects and sell in a way that their prospects want to be sold.

The sales intelligence puzzle

Amarpreet: Today, when sales teams are typically selling to anyone, they’re working with a bunch of data, a bunch of insights. The common thing is that there will almost always be an account intelligence solution, like ZoomInfo or Apollo. And yes, you can get someone’s phone number and email id, that is true, but most of the information, technographic intent, everything is about the company. Now that you have enough data, you can match your ICP and whatnot. Second is conversational intelligence, we see companies using Gong, and we call solutions like that rep intelligence. Primarily it’s used by sales leaders to coach their reps. Now you have intelligence about rep sections while selling. The third piece is deal intelligence, something similar to Clari. And now know about deals, you know how deals are progressing.

Buyer intelligence is the missing piece

Amarpreet: But now, the question is, for anyone who’s been in selling, if you ask them, what are sales all about? They will say sales is all about people, and sales is all about people buying from people and people buying from people they trust. The question becomes, what do you know about the people who will actually make the purchase> And that’s where all the leaders fumble. When we ask them that question, they say, we use LinkedIn, and that’s all. LinkedIn is a starting point, knowing where you went to college or where you worked.

But that doesn’t help us build trust. Trust gets built when people used to spend a lot of time in person, with a glass of wine and dining. I met some customers a couple of weeks ago, and we literally spent an hour talking about their families, their plans, and what they’re doing. That’s how you get to know people. That is what we try to bring to the table. That’s what we call the missing piece of the puzzle. We call it buyer intelligence, and that’s what has been missing. People have tried to make it work, but now we are making it very easy for teams to always have it with them.

Humantic AI top features

Amarpreet: The number one feature which makes us special and unique is our personality AI engine. We are one of the very few companies that can predict people’s personalities, and that personality leads to personal relationships. What is your personality, what kind of a person are you, what appeals to you, and what doesn’t appeal to you? Should I come into this podcast or a deal? Should I just be cracking jokes with you, or should I just be going on ROI? There are many things, and people are different. That’s the whole point. Personality AI, which tells you exactly what will work with someone, that’s number one.

The number two is that with Personality AI, you can personalize anything, and we have recently launched a feature called one-click personalization. People send a lot of emails, LinkedIn DMs, and people make a lot of calls. How can you send a personalized email, not just a usual email? How can that email differ for every individual you sell to? That’s that easy personalization across the sales funnel.

Humantic AI best integrations

Amarpreet: We integrate into all the sales teams’ systems and have almost a dozen plus attributes. What is your influence in your organization? What is your education level? What’s your seniority level? What is your age? What is your experience? How long you’ve been at that company? We can write all of that into a CRM in an automated manner, so you don’t need manually people sitting and doing that. Now that data can be used for segmentation.

We have a web application that can be used to analyze buying committees. We have a Chrome extension that works alongside almost every platform, including LinkedIn Sales Navigator, HubSpot, Salesforce, Outreach, Zoom, etc. Then we have APIs that can be used to integrate into custom applications. And finally, we have the enrichments that are built out beyond the Chrome extension, like writing data into those systems.

Humantic AI pricing plans

Amarpreet: Our pricing is straightforward. There are two parts. One is just the number of users, so user licenses, and the second is the number of enrichments. Some people sell to only a few hundred leads a month because they don’t have a sales motion and do account-based selling. Someone else might be selling to thousands and sending emails to thousands of people or making thousands of calls. The number of salespeople plus several profiles you enrich, combine and make up the pricing.

Our core focus at this point is on revenue. We say buyer intelligence for revenue teams. We have a few customers using us for hiring, but that’s not where we have proven results as much. That’s not where we spend time. Revenue and sales are where we do that because both need personalization, and both need to know their buyers. The impact that we have on that side is tremendous. I often tell people a story where we recently did a pilot our results. Six times better than what the goal was. Our customer thought that the instrumentation was broken. We told them that it was because everyone was selling in such an impersonal manner. It’s just crazy spammy out there. But as soon as you do something that makes you stand out, you start seeing those results.

Starting the company

Amarpreet: We were among the first to market this technology. In fact, we built the core platform a long time ago as part of my earlier startup. This is my second AI startup and second SaaS startup. At some point, we found ourselves using it for selling. And that’s where we brought this as a product to the market. But there are around four or five other companies that do it. And I think it’s still a new space for many, but on the enterprise side, I think it’s not that new because it’s used by almost 70% of Fortune 500.

We started in April 2020. We’ve been doing the original research actually that underlies our algorithm started happening in 2015, so a long time ago, as part of my first startup. And then, around 2019, we started experimenting, and in 2021 we began Humantic AI. We are around 16 people right now across US and India primarily. And I think we are hiring some people in the Latin America area. We are a largely remote hybrid team with customers mainly in the US.

How to attract angel investors for your startup

Amarpreet: We’ve raised a couple of million dollars, raised in angel funding, and not raised any institutional funding. Our angels are some of the world’s most prominent, well-known angels. Some of them include people who’ve had companies like Slack, Miro, and Tesla. Our angels include people on the board of companies like Lockheed, Asana, Coinbase, etc. We are backed by some prominent angels.

I think the advice is easy to give. We can always say a gazillion things, but as I said, I have been doing this for a while. My startup journey is almost ten years long. A lot of learning comes through. But ultimately, I think what we all got to keep in mind is to solve a problem that people care about. You must solve a real problem, but we must also educate the market. And we have seen that educating in a trusting manner is always better than educating in a boring manner. Our product introduction video is a rap video. We like to do a lot of fun stuff. It’s important to educate the market, especially if you’re a new kind of product.

How to use social selling to build trust

Amarpreet: For us, one thing that’s worked effectively is that we’ve tried to use social selling actively. If you are on LinkedIn, you’ll probably see us quite a bit. And our customers also love the product and talk about us often. We try to make sure that we are making it easy for people to talk about those things. We try to collaborate with people who are seen as experts, and now it’ll only work if the product works, but even if the product works, I always think people buy something when they can triangulate something. That means if you hear about a product from three independent sources, you will likely consider it seriously.

What is your vision for Humantic AI?

Amarpreet: That’s a big question. It’s always a heavily loaded question. We don’t play very humble when it comes to that question. I like to call it mission, and I think our mission is to humanize interactions. That’s where our name Humantic AI comes from. Virtual calls usually put distance between people, right? If you and I were sitting in a coffee shop having this conversation, it’d be a very different conversation than a Zoom conversation. Technology is actually putting distance between us. I’m in Bangalore right now, I was in Bay Area a few weeks ago, but people are like – hey, we don’t need to meet. There’s no need to meet because we are so comfortable with just a Zoom call. And that puts distance between us. We don’t really get to connect.

But it is all about knowing other people better. If we can help people and understand others, we will reduce that distance. We will humanize those interactions. If I come into this conversation knowing a little bit about you, we will have a better interaction than me just coming in and saying – okay, I’m talking to some podcaster on some podcast. That is what we focus on. That’s what we obsess about. How can we humanize how people interact, starting with selling because selling is very transactional? That’s what we hope to accomplish.

What is your story, Amarpreet?

Amarpreet: That’s a long story. From a career perspective, I’ve been around for 22 years now. I am a product person, who built technology products for approximately ten years working in the industry mostly, but AI was not very big. It was a bit of AI, but extensive data and large-scale products. In 2010, I said, hold on, I’ve been working for ten years. I thought about what products should be built and how things should work. That’s when I started my first startup. I started in 2011, but the startup came together in 2014. I spent around seven or eight years working on that one. I had a great time and had some not-so-great times. And then, that led to Humantic AI in 2021, which took off.

Ask yourself what you want

Amarpreet: I hate giving advice, advice is easy to give, but sometimes we need just to get back to the basics. The most important thing is you should know what you want, right? You want an easy life. You want balance, or you want money. You want success. If you want to change the world, you should know and not give up. It’s easier said than done, but understand what it takes. Depending on your goal’s size, it will require an equally big sacrifice. I keep telling my team that I keep meeting people who want a lot in life but are not prepared to put in the sacrifice that success requires.

Another thing I would say, especially true today about what we spoke about, is the whole humanization thing. I think we all need to be a little bit more empathetic and a little bit less transactional. For all salespeople, too, right? It’s not always about selling. It’s okay to sometimes just do a good thing for someone. Every email you send doesn’t have to be a follow-up for deal closure. Sometimes you can share something useful without really expecting anything. I think that that that makes it better for everyone. That’s the only thing I’ll say because I don’t see it happening often. That’s the last piece from my side.