OAKLAND, Calif., Aug. 18, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- You think you know PreSales. The demo squad. The RFP responders. The supporting cast of the sales team.
Well, appearances are deceptive.
Beneath PreSales’ unassuming exterior lies a source of immense power. PreSales has data no one else does—data that can drive product development, identify sales opportunities and lock in new sources of revenue.
Vivun’s latest release is Hero: Volume 1, the brainchild of Vivun cofounder and Chief Data Scientist Joe Miller. A trained economist, nuclear physicist and AI specialist, Miller has assembled a team of experts from international finance to apply machine learning techniques similar to those guiding decisions at organizations that trade billions of dollars a day.
“In a sense, we’re mapping the minds of the PreSales team and feeding their knowledge back into the business at just the right moment, so salespeople can find and close deals and product teams can build better and smarter,” Miller said.
Vivun created Hero for the new era of buyer-led growth, where empowered buyers, not vendors, dictate the terms of the sales process. PreSales engineers—also known as sales engineers or sales consultants—work side-by-side with customers on demos and pilots, and are increasingly responsible for unlocking new sources of revenue as well. This combination of roles gives PreSales a unique strategic perspective, which Hero taps into for the first time.
It’s an approach that Vivun believes requires a new category of software, PreSales Intel and Ops, combining tools for planning, measurement and collaboration with AI-driven insights that go straight to the bottom line. In addition to powerful team-management functionality, Hero assesses the chance of closing deals in flight, spots dormant sales opportunities that have come back to life and alerts product teams to gaps in their offerings that conventional customer feedback tools would never detect.
“We compare Hero to creating a model of your best PreSales engineer’s brain,” Miller said. “It unites the product and go-to-market teams using knowledge only PreSales can deliver.”
AI-powered capabilities in Hero: Volume 1 include:
- Hero Score®: Vivun’s Hero Score surfaces and analyzes PreSales insights, rating deals on a 1-100 scale based on its confidence that the business can deliver technology the customer wants and needs. The latest version of Hero Score balances expert and self-learning to better reflect how PreSales leaders rate the technical strength of a deal at different stages of their pipeline, with varying levels of available data. And in keeping with Vivun’s “no black box” philosophy, Hero Score’s AI explains its decisions in clear natural language anyone can understand.
- Product Gap Clustering: Hero takes the guesswork out of product development by using AI to identify which features and enhancements will make the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time—versus the time-wasting and error-prone process of sorting through a mountain of Jira tickets and trying to manually prioritize a product roadmap. Using AI-powered clustering and natural-language technology to identify the most urgent customer needs—even if they’re described differently in different places—Hero spots the gaps between existing capabilities and customer demand, then tracks and visualizes the financial impact of these gaps over time. In doing so, Hero enables product teams to make the case for new enhancements and attribute revenue to ones they’ve already built—with perfect confidence.
- Calendar Intelligence: Hero’s AI brings automation to the tedious process of inputting activities by analyzing the information embedded in PreSales calendars, thereby eliminating one of the dreaded tasks in any PreSales professional’s day. Vivun’s dynamic self-learning system grows more accurate at predicting which calendar events are associated with a given opportunity, and how calendar events translate into PreSales activities. And rather than rely on hit-or-miss manual tracking—or all too often, no tracking at all—PreSales managers gain a holistic view of what their team is doing at all times, which in turn enables team members to demonstrate their impact and value.
The foundation for Vivun’s AI and why it works in the real world, Miller said, is Vivun’s unique PreSales ontology. “It’s like a digital blueprint of the PreSales organization—what it knows, and where it knows it. It allows Hero to follow customers through the journey of their business and recall what worked well in the past and how they can win deals today. As employees come and go, Hero remembers what they knew and has that knowledge ready to go whenever and wherever it’s needed.”
With customers including Snowflake, Cloudera, Autodesk, Fivetran and Harness, Hero has quickly become a favorite among successful, fast-growing software companies.
“The best PreSales teams are using AI to their advantage, leveraging it to distribute key PreSales insights to the business that drive product-field alignment as well as enhance the sales forecast. That’s the value that the Vivun PSIOps platform has given my team at Harness: the power to influence the company’s strategic direction and help capture market share, and get full credit for doing so,” said Nick Durkin, Field CTO at Harness.
“PreSales is the superpower hidden within every B2B tech company,” said Vivun co-founder and CEO Matt Darrow. “Hero helps businesses harness their unutilized potential and keep product and sales in perfect sync.”
To learn more about Hero: Volume 1 or schedule a demo, visit the Vivun website here.
About Vivun
Vivun equips PreSales leaders with the world's first AI-powered PreSales Intel & Ops Platform that lets them run their team as a business, create product-field alignment and communicate their value. Vivun unlocks the strategic potential of PreSales and prepares them to take their place on the front lines of modern B2B selling, ushering in a new era of Buyer-Led Growth. Customers include Autodesk, Cloudera, Snowflake, Crowdstrike, Dell, and Harness. To learn more visit www.vivun.com.
Media Contact
Chris Ulbrich
Firebrand Communications
T – 415 848 9175
E – vivun@firebrand.marketing
