Sales teams seeking a faster way to build customer relationships without sacrificing their integrity might be getting a leg up from a Toronto-based sales technology startup.
Founded in 2014, Nudge Software Inc. recently released its flagship product, Nudge.ai, a sales platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to provide sales teams with actionable insights into their target customers.
“Artificial intelligence thrives in challenging areas of pattern recognition,” Nudge marketing director Kevin Hurley wrote in a Feb. 7 press release. “We are all familiar with applications such as robotics or self-driving cars. The challenge facing sales professionals as they attempt to find ways to build trusting relationships with hundreds or thousands of target accounts is quite similar and ripe for an AI approach.”
Nudge works on two levels: Like a personalized search engine, it begins by skimming through the deluge of news, social, marketing and relationship data available on your social, CRM, and any other networks you wish to connect it with to build a list of potential clients, which it then feeds into workflow tools such as Salesforce, Slack, and Google Chrome.
It then filters through that information by turning its namesake app into a one-stop social network, one that highlights updates its algorithm considers “actionable sales insights” such as personal mentions, acquisitions, funding announcements, and leadership changes; and that invites users to respond in-app – helping them build professional relationships along the way.
The longer Nudge is used, the better its AI knows you, and the more adept it becomes at providing recommendations you’re likely to have a strong relationship with when you ask for a potential contact at a particular company, or in a particular position.
“Knowing who the buyer already has a strong and trusting relationship with is crucial at the early stages of their outreach,” Hurley wrote. “That’s why Nudge understands not just the connection graph, but measures the strength of all relationships around a prospective buyer, and improves a sales person’s ability to connect by highlighting who the buyer already trusts.”
Though Nudge itself is a new player on Canada’s tech – and more importantly, software-driven marketing – stage, its founders Paul Teshima and Steven Woods are not. Prior to Nudge, Teshima and Woods were founding executives at Eloqua Corp., the Toronto-based success story that helped define marketing automation during the decade after its 1999 creation before being going public and being acquired by Oracle for $957 million in 2012.
Perhaps thanks to that pedigree, sales professionals from such tech giants as Adobe Systems Inc., HP Inc., SAS Institute Inc., and Shopify Inc. rely on Nudge’s AI to feed their teams a constant stream of high-quality engagement opportunities.
“Sales professionals must build trust with multiple decision makers across a large number of companies, and do so over a period of time that can stretch from months to years,” Hurley wrote. “Manually digging through public news sources, social media activity, and internal marketing systems for hints of what topics would best lead to a good conversation is a daunting task. Nudge uses the latest in AI techniques to do this research for the sales person and highlights the best opportunities to engage buyers.”
Nudge’s Team Plan presently costs $29.95 per user per month. To learn more, visit Nudge’s website here, or check out the video below.