Digital marketing for generating, nurturing, and qualifying leads is a long and tedious process, littered with numerous mundane and repetitive tasks. So no wonder AI found its way into this process, to take over those tasks that humans aren’t thrilled about.
Yaron Ismah-Moshe, Co-Founder and CPO of Exceed.ai, an intelligent AI assistant platform for marketing-sales teams, believes that we have a long and fruitful future working alongside AI assistants ahead of us. Relying on his company’s data of millions of AI-to-human interactions, Ismah-Moshe shares what he has learned about the efficiency of Ai in marketing, the acceptance of AI by humans, and whether AI will ever be able to make a sales call.
Yaron Ismah-Moshe, Co-Founder and CPO of Exceed.ai
AI assistants are making their way into multiple aspects of marketing and customer support. What’s the current ‘glass ceiling’? What AI assistants still can’t do (except for the obvious, like conducting a phone call)?
At Exceed.ai, we believe that the future of AI in marketing and customer support is the augmented workforce – humans working alongside virtual assistants. Humans are good at building relationships, understanding nuances, and customer needs while virtual assistants help with scale, persistence, and offload a lot of humans’ repetitive tasks.
To follow up on this, do you believe the so-called AI-glass ceiling will be shattered in the foreseeable future? Are we going to have full-fledged sales calls with bots?
We do believe that virtual assistants will be able to make phone calls in the near future, but it’ll take a lot of time until virtual assistants will be able to carry on a meaningful sales conversation. Bots are great at understanding the words someone says but not as good at understanding the tone and intention of the people saying them. Bots will not replace humans but will help them to be better at what they do and exceed their goals.
Do you think there’s acceptance of engaging with bots? When people realize (do they?) the email they got is actually from a bot, is there a revolt on behalf of the human?
From what we are seeing, after sending millions of emails, there is no decline in the number of responses to our email bot vs. emails that were sent by a human sales rep. Emails can go out from a virtual assistant email address (which looks like an email address of a real person), or from the email address of the human rep. In both cases, we are seeing great response rates and we don’t see any indication that prospects feel this is a bot. In some cases, people get a kick out of it when our sales reps tell them that the whole time they were communicating with a bot. We’ve even had our virtual assistants get lunch invitations!
Moving on to the Exceed platform, your website mentions “conversational AI” and “human-like two-way conversations” – how do you teach an algorithm to converse with humans?
We have collected millions of emails which helped us train the AI on what a typical conversation with a lead looks like. In addition, we have a patent on the way our platform knows to improve the AI automatically. It’s based on human selections in the cases where the AI doesn’t know how to respond and as humans make choices in those scenarios, the AI learns for next time. As these volumes amass the sophistication level of our AI grows. The more customers we get, the more data we get, which improves the AI in a continual learning cycle that we call the Data Network Effect.
To what degree your AI acts autonomously, and how much hand-holding it still needs from the companies that are using it?
For the standard Sales and Marketing conversation, our AI is autonomous with an accuracy rate of 95%. When customers change the campaign for different purposes, or when we have a new customer from a brand new domain, it might require some time to train the AI, but this is usually done on the fly as we gain data and replies for this customer. For the majority of our customers, the AI is fully autonomous.
I’m assuming you, as a company, use your own product for lead nurturing and qualification. What did you learn about lead engagement? Can you share dos and don’ts for other companies out there?
Of course at Exceed, we use Exceed for our nurture programs. One thing we believe is that there are two big advantages of using a virtual assistant. The first is a common rule but AI just does it better and that is timing. The virtual assistant can follow up whenever is the right time for the lead, day or night, and is never too busy or forgets to do it. Another advantage is that virtual assistants never give up on a lead. Most lead engagement campaigns have a finite timeline and then the lead is considered inactive or lost. Marketers spend countless hours and dollars acquiring leads so why would you ever give up on them if you don’t need to? One interesting statistic we’ve found is that unresponsive leads have a 1% response rate at the 10th email sent, most lead nurtures end long before that.
Q: One of the main pillars of lead nurturing is email, a marketing channel with notoriously low response rates. Again, relying on the collective data Exceed has from its own activity and that of its customers, please share three tips for better email nurturing.
Email nurturing has to be done right, otherwise, it’ll just cause frustration due to lack of responses. The tips we can share, based on our data, for better email nurturing, are:
- Make it fun – Don’t stay with the standard email and messaging – try to get out of the box with your subject line and the first two sentences to attract your lead to open the email and keep them engaged once they do.
- Make it personalized – Use a small piece of information about the lead you are approaching and embed it your email.
- Make it nurturing, not salesy – Don’t push your lead. It’s nurturing. It should be much softer. Warm your lead, so they get familiar with your messaging and content. Once they are ready they will respond back.
Q: Looking at the numbers, from your experience with current customers, does Exceed.ai provide financial benefits by enabling companies to cut down on their marketing teams?
Of course! Otherwise, they wouldn’t continue with Exceed. We are providing great results to our customers. We help companies increase their qualified leads by 81%, cut the cost for qualified leads by 67%, and increase their annual recurring revenue (ARR) by 57%. In fact, in an effort to be transparent and express our confidence in our product’s value, our customers can see the ROI of our platform in their main dashboard inside Exceed.
