SetSail: Sales Enablement Redefined via Revenue Execution

Follow SetSail on :

SetSail

Haggai Levi, CEO, SetSailHaggai Levi, CEO
“If big data is the new oil, then machine learning is the refinery.” Reading between the lines of this enterprise tech wisdom would reveal the ‘process improvement’ factor associated with ‘actionable’ insights from AI/ML adoption. In this regard, California-based SetSail helps enterprises foster the novelty of revenue execution for modern sales teams, enabling them to ramp up sales with market demand. The company’s revenue intelligence platform bridges the gap between sales data and behavior.
In an interview with CIO Applications, Haggai Levi, CEO of SetSail, talks about how the company helps clients automate and streamline sales data and transform data insights into signals. Ultimately, the goal is to improve sales outcomes by changing rep behaviors.

Please give us a quick overview of SetSail.

Founded in 2018, SetSail is a series-A stage startup specializing in revenue execution. We start by capturing sales data and running machine learning on it to discover what the optimal sales behaviors are for a given client. Then we enable companies to motivate their reps to take the right actions using what we call “micro-incentives.” Unlike traditional SPIFFs which reward activity, these incentives are targeted toward the actions that lead to genuine deal progress. In my experience working for Google, I found that as a very effective way to change behavior at scale for many reps.

Could you throw more light on the features and functionalities of your platform?

We have two parts to our platform. The first part is the sales data automation platform, which works in the background to automate the collection of sales data. We have customers that have even used it as their software for offline analysis. The second part pertains to signal-based selling, which is a way to build sales programs that track and reward specific behaviors. With a library of over 400 signals, sales leaders can quickly create programs incentivize reps around the signals that matter most to them. Managers will be able to see how many points their reps are getting and from where, and reps can redeem their winnings for gift cards and cash rewards.

What were the factors that spurred the conception of SetSail?

For eight years, I’ve served Google in running machine learning and data science programs for productivity improvements, especially around sales, which gave me a lot of know-how. We found that there are so many dashboards in sales environments across companies that sales leaders and sellers are getting confused. Even at Google, things got to a point where we had so many dashboards available for thousands of sellers that we had dashboards to monitor how people were using our dashboards. Something had to inherently change in terms of how companies approached sales. We found the answer in data automation and how insights could be mapped to personnel behavior to drive superior sales enablement. And that’s precisely what SetSail helps companies achieve.

Could you throw more light on the market trends and challenges pertaining to sales process enablement?

Revenue leaders in many companies are under huge pressure to improve results and sell more.

Recruiting more people is one solution, but it’s a very costly and time-consuming process.The other way to address this need is to improve the productivity of existing sales reps. And to achieve that, companies must change their traditional ideals of sales data gathering and processing that’s largely based on self-reporting, where sales reps are expected to manually enter data into their CRMs. That is the equivalent of using fax during the internet era. There are systems and technology in place that can completely automate the entire interaction between the reps and their customers. As such, if you want to improve productivity, the first problem that you need to solve is the data problem.

To this end, we have our data automation platform that connects to all your endpoints with customers, be it email, calendar, CRM, or even Zoom, for that matter. We have almost 20 different integrations, and it collects all that data automatically and organizes and maps that data back to your CRM.

Our clients get to leverage two major things here. One, you’re saving time where your reps don’t need to manually enter that data into the CRM. Second, you’re getting a dataset that is much more accurate.
Our solution also gives you the foundational data to understand what the sales reps are doing, who they are communicating with, and why. From there, we help companies change the behavior of their reps in a very scaled and specific manner.

In any company, about 10 percent of sales reps are phenomenal salespeople. The rest are the ones that typically need help in modifying their behavior at scale. For instance, let’s say that I know from my data that engaging with a C-level executive in a company is critical to closing the deal. To this end, our signal-based selling tool allows me to reward the rep if they engage with the executive. This sort of behavior-led incentivization approach allows the sales leader to influence that 90 percent of reps. That’s the value we bring to the table.

Who are your typical customers and what does your onboarding process look like?

Our typical customers are large revenue teams with a hundred reps or more. Some of our esteemed clients include Cisco, LinkedIn, and Dropbox. And since we embrace a data lake architecture, the only thing they’d have to do to go up and running with the solution is to connect to it with the relevant APIs, which take about half an hour tops. We have privacy and security measures that allow you to control what information is being read and how long you’d use it. We come back to you in about 24 hours with initial insights on how much data we see on our systems that are not currently in your CRM. To put things in perspective, when we rolled out our sales data automation platform at Cisco, we were able to find 250,000 new contacts that were not in their CRM.

Please share with us a customer success story or two.

Cisco currently engages more than 5,000 reps with our platform across 90 countries. Our solution is fully compliant with the strict data regulations in European countries. Cisco did an internal study to understand the benefits of sales data automation when used on such a large scale. It was found that they are getting an additional revenue of 170 million dollars as an upside to using our platform. And the reason is there’s so much data currently floating in their calendar and email that is not being logged in their CRM. They had to set new sales territories every year, and because there was no data in the CRM, it took reps about 45 days to populate the CRM. When we turned on SetSail, the data was automatically mapped into the CRM, saving them those 45 days.

Going beyond harvesting sales data and running machine learning on it, we enable companies to motivate the sales reps to take the right actions

On the signal-based selling side, we’ve had great success in improving sales productivity by changing behaviors. At Pendo for instance, we chose five different behaviors that we wanted the reps to modify. One of them was getting reps to hold more meetings with VP-level contacts. By incentivizing reps for high-impact behaviors like that, Pendo was able to get a 12 percent increase in their total sales productivity, meaning reps were closing 12% more business.

How has the recent past been for you as a company? And what does the roadmap look like for SetSail?

Our value proposition has always been a huge tailwind for us. In 2020, we saw 10X growth in revenue, and we are going to end 2021 with 3X growth. We were also lucky enough to partner with Insight Partners last December, and we raised a significant round of $26 million led by them. Looking ahead, we will continue to make investments in our platform while we bring in more clients. We already have some more Fortune-500 companies in our pipeline.

Read Also



Featured Vendors