Recently, I had an interview with Yamini Bhat, CEO of Vymo, an AI-enabled Personal Assistant for sales professionals. Vymo grabbed the eyeballs recently when it was selected from 128 applications across 28 countries to participate in Bangkok Bank’s accelerator program — Bangkok Bank InnoHub that aims to develop innovative products and services suitable for the Thailand and Southeast Asia markets.
You can read the complete interview below:
1. Tell us about Vymo and what do you do?
Vymo is an AI-enabled Personal Assistant for Sales that predicts what a sales rep should do next, detects the rep’s actions automatically, learns from the best reps in the organization, and coaches reps to achieve best outcomes.
Yamini Bhat, CEO of Vymo
Vymo improves productivity metrics such as conversion percentage, turnaround time, and sales activities per opportunity while impacting revenue directly.
With Vymo, salespeople can focus on high-ROI activities so that their time is not spent reporting data. It helps managers make need-based interventions so they can help their team convert more deals. It offers analytics and insight to Sales Leaders so they can predict business outcomes more accurately.
2. Vymo has been successful across multiple channels in banking, insurance, financial services and has been successfully deployed in over 50 large global enterprises. What are the key challenges Vymo tries to solve?
Lead and partner management are pain points for most sales managers. Allocating the right leads to the right sales reps, ensuring the right follow up activities are performed at the right time, and intervening when required, are issues that sales team leaders struggle with and are always looking to optimize. Vymo does all this automatically and even provides powerful analytics using which the bottlenecks of a sale strategy can be tackled effectively.
3. From a tech standpoint, how does Vymo work? How does it understand and predict the next best actions, which nudge salespeople to act on the right customers and opportunities?
At Vymo, we analyze data of the best sales reps across the organization and correlate activities to outcomes. The Vymo engine can predict with a high degree of accuracy, for instance, when a sales rep should reach out to a prospect based on a variety of parameters, such as lead source, prospect profile, product, location, time of quarter/year, and so on. Based on this data, the Vymo app suggests ‘next best actions’, which proactively nudges reps into performing high-ROI activities, such as calls and meetings, at the most optimal time.
4. How is it different in each vertical, banking for instance, as opposed to Pharma & Insurance?
While the broader issues faced by salespeople in each vertical are more or less the same, Vymo has been proven to be highly customizable and scalable to solve several deep industry-specific use cases. From accelerating customer acquisition and reducing turn around time (TAT) for banks, to tracking sales rep movement across large geographies for pharmaceutical companies, and even optimizing the workflow for a fast-growing sales force for insurance companies, Vymo has been customized to solve pain points based on the problems being faced by the client.
5. When it comes to AI, there is a common fear that someday, AI will replace the human workforce. In Vymo’s case, AI empowers salespeople with additional intelligence, rather than make them redundant. But do you think Vymo will someday become self-conscious and will need no human intervention to sell?
Our vision is to help salespeople all over the world ‘do more’. With the help of our product, we want salespeople everywhere to be able to perform 25% better every year. Going forward, rote tasks like entering data into a CRM should not be something that sales reps should concern themselves with. They should be able to focus on interacting with customers.
We believe that the human element of a sale is still very important, and building relationships and trust with the customers is still the best way to sell.
So no, Vymo becoming sentient and turning into super seller by itself isn’t something that’s on the cards. We’re here only to enable salespeople, and not replace them.
5. Tell us about some of the key milestones in your journey so far.
Vymo caught a break in Feb 2016, when SBI Life – India’s largest private Life Insurance companies, signed on for a pilot engagement to increase technology adoption among its field sales teams. In just under 8 weeks, Vymo was able to demonstrate an increase of over 77% in engagement! This led to another discovery – large enterprises seemed a surreptitious bunch; they loved working with companies that had already proved their mettle in similar companies. Today, Vymo works with four of the top five private banks in India and other leading organizations worldwide. Vymo is recognized by Gartner, AWS and CB Insights for Prescriptive Sales and is funded by Sequoia Capital.
6. Future plans?
We built Vymo keeping in mind that it is supposed to help sales reps more than giving them a feeling that they are being monitored. Going forward, our focus will be to improve user experience and strengthen the tool and its intelligence to drive maximum business impact.
