US and UK social selling vendor Artesian Solutions claimed that their 16.1 software release was their “biggest ever.”  The release included functional upgrades, expanded content, user experience improvements, and new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

The new Insight Agents are their first step towards delivering “intelligent chat bots aimed at automating many of the tasks carried out by B2B professionals daily.”  The new AI tool combines advanced natural language processing and behavioural analytics.  The goal is to “deliver commercially valuable and immediately actionable insights, telling the user what they need to know and what action they need to take.”

The evolution of Natural Language Processing, Machine Based Learning and Artificial Intelligence technology is set to have a profound impact on the activities of those in commercial teams.  This product release is a significant stepping stone towards an AI future, the culmination of months of behind-the-scenes R&D based on an incredibly rich understanding of the enterprise B2B landscape through the eyes of some of the biggest and most influential companies in the world. We have been working closely with them to understand what their future looks like and where the biggest gains can be made.

• Artesian CTO Steve Borthwick

Continued Borthwick, “Artesian has been evolving and improving its relevance and analytic algorithms over the last 10 years, benefiting from the feedback and success that our trusted customers have provided, and that has always kept them one step ahead of the sales intelligence race.”

Insight Agents are initially available within the AppExchange as Salesforce Opportunities.  This feature surfaces trigger events based upon the opportunity stage and preferences of each client.  “It provides a step change in productivity and customer engagement, enabling you to focus on the most important aspects of your most critical deals,” said VP of Product Management Rich Clark.

For example, Insights for Sales Opportunities will place higher emphasis upon opportunity alerts at the front of the pipeline and risk-based alerts during later stages.

“This latest release without doubt places Artesian at the leading edge of innovation for enterprise B2B,” said CEO Andrew Yates. It delivers the first milestone on our road-map to predicting customer needs, automating and directing pipeline activities, and the delivery of hyper-personalised communications and custom marketing.”

Administrators can now tailor the trigger topics available to their users including adding custom topics and constructing a topic taxonomy focused on industry-specific triggers.

User experience improvements include easier access to topic filters, color-coded triggers in email alerts, and adaptive HTML design for improved mobile navigation and display.

Other design upgrades include the social media viewer which now surfaces social media links alongside inline blogs and tweets and a social selling leaderboard at the team or corporate level which benchmarks Artesian usage versus peers.

“Hotness” flags were added to the US service. They have long been available in the UK edition.

In the UK edition, Artesian partnered with Blue Sheep to add three million contacts and double the number of emails to 875,000.  The additional executives were focused on non-directorial positions, helping expand coverage beyond filed corporate directors.  The new set of contacts raised the UK contact count to 9.7 million.  Furthermore, the new execs were matched against the Full Contact file, providing additional social media links and biographic relevance to contact profiles.

The expanded contacts and social media links are also available to users of the Artesian Ready mobile app which combines mobile calendars with Artesian insights.  Ready helps reps prepare for meetings by supporting on demand company and executive research, sharing meeting notes with colleagues, and reviewing the latest attendee triggers and social media posts.

The firm also added Auditor Fees as a new UK select.  Auditor Name was already supported.

For the US edition, Artesian now supports a “Hotness” indicator highlighting firms with recent key trigger events and improved event prospecting (see image above on right).  The Hotness indicator was already available in the UK edition.

Artesian has formalized its training and certification program with an integrated leaning management system.  The older training was more PowerPoint oriented but the new system is more blog-like with videos and quizzes.  Along with tool certification, Artesian includes annual refresher courses.