AI Lead Conversion start-up Exceed.AI closed on a $4 million seed round led by Glilot Capital and West Fountain Global Fund. Also participating were Alex Pinchev, former President of Red Hat, and Gur Shomron, the chairman of Israel’s WalkMe. Funds will be deployed to expand into new markets and onboard additional marketing clients.
Exceed.AI pulls lead information from Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot, Pardot, Salesforce, and SugarCRM to assist with conversations. Features include an AI chatbot, SMS chatbot, email response bot, CRM synchronization, and an automated meeting scheduler. Exceed also offers rules-based lead qualification and the ability to respond to questions. Exception handling features include out-of-office follow up and no-show follow up.
“Some of our clients have seen up to a 39.5% increase in qualified leads for the same marketing efforts they already undertake without additional headcount,” said CEO Ilan Kasan. “Our strength lies in our multi-channel approach. We reach audiences where crucial conversations occur when marketing teams are qualifying their leads.”
Exceed research found that out of office follow up results in a fifty percent lift in lead qualification. They recommend a “short, cheery” welcome back email two days after the lead returns to the office before resuming the previous drip campaign.
“In a perfect world, every lead gets engaged by a human, but human follow-up isn’t scalable, and sales reps give up on leads too quickly,” said the firm. “So the majority of your leads are left untouched and sales opportunities are missed.”
Exceed noted that 44% of reps give up after one or two touches, leaving many leads to go fallow. Bots will continue the touches, waiting for engagement.
“Robots are very good at speed, working at scale, they never get tired, they never complain, they’re persistent and they can process huge amounts of information,” Kasan explained to Entrepreneur. “Humans are good at relationships, feeling empathy. They’re very good at understanding nuance in complex situations. Everything the robots are good at, humans hate doing and actually are not that good at doing. And everything that humans know to do, robots don’t know to do. This in essence is a partnership whereby the robot will automate all the manual repetitive tasks so the humans can focus on doing what they know to do best, which is closing deals, having conversations and having relationships.”
Sales reps should focus on tasks that require “critical thinking and evaluation,” blogged Head of Marketing, Billy Attar. Conversely, “all tasks that can be handled by automation should be automated.”
“As a Sales Manager, you need to maximize the time your reps spend on tasks that require real human insight – the insight only they are qualified to give, ultimately representing the value they bring to the company. Those human insights include researching prospects and evaluating each leads’ needs, interests and objections, answering their asked and unstated questions… all the things that Sales Reps and SDRs are supposed to do.”
Exceed.AI Head of Marketing Billy Attar
Exceed.AI lists Demandbase, SugarCRM, Hearst, The YMCA, and Universal Robots as clients. Exceed.AI is located in Israel and Sunnyvale, CA.
Monthly pricing starts at $1,500 for 20,000 leads and unlimited use cases (campaigns).