When working in sales, you need to make sure that all of the moving parts are working in conjunction with each other to make your sales process as seamless as possible. Garbage in, results in garbage out and often the process of interacting and inputting data into your CRM can be tedious and time consuming. This is where technology can really help. If you are looking to supercharge your CRM look at Rollio, a virtual assistant for Salesforce that understands and communicates in normal spoken English. Use voice commands powered by natural language processing and AI to assist your sales team, save hours with clients, and collect data. The technology is smart by adapting and learning along the way. The company has raised previously raised a seed round of funding and is looking to expand even further.
AlleyWatch chatted with founder Jake Soffer about the company and discussed how chatbots are changing sales.
Tell us about the product or service.
Rollio is the Salesforce.com Partner to build the first Virtual AI Assistant for Sales and Service teams. Rollio allows users to speak and chat with Salesforce like a human, so they can spend their time with customers and not manually filling out Salesforce…while companies collect more data, valuable data, and accurate data.
How is it different?
This is not a simple bot or chatbot. We use Deep NLP and AI to configure & deploy an AI model specific to each customers’ needs, sales/service process, and Salesforce setup. Rollio also actively learns about each individual user, getting smarter and more intuitive through usage. This is the first system that can understand full sentences, context, and intent to read user message, parse information, and auto-populate Salesforce completely with everything that is relevant and meaningful information. Rollio does not prompt you question-by-question or just match on basic keyword search. This is software that truly conforms to you and not the other way around, if you can text… you’ve now mastered Salesforce.com.
What market are you attacking and how big is it?
The world of CRM, and it’s a massive one that we’re thrilled to be a part of. We were focused on Sales, but we realized productivity, collecting valuable data, and top quality compliance is highly valued in Sales, service, support, success, and everything CRM.
What is the business model?
Out core application is a pretty standard SaaS model, we’ve done with the purpose and mission of delivering a breakthrough piece of technology in a simple form and making it available to small companies and Fortune 500 companies.
What inspired the business?
Using CRMs and getting bogged down with busy work! We want to focus on the important stuff. Customers and happy hour at the bar, so we built the perfect assistant that fills out CRM for us… and does a way better job at it.
Do you have any fears about building a business that is centered around a derivative product like Salesforce?
Not at all, we couldn’t think of a better partner to work with than the company that said “Let’s do CRM differently” (exactly what we’re still pushing) and continues to push intelligence and momentum in the CRM world. For example their big push with AI and Salesforce Einstein. Additionally, we have some great partnerships with companies that want really intelligent AI Conversation Chatbots that people actually like talking to, rather than using a cookie cutter bot builder or template. One of those awesome partnerships is with Workjam.com. We have a couple other coming out that we’re excited to announce soon!
What are the milestones that you plan to achieve within six months?
One of the reasons we worked with Carsten Thoma as our main investor is because he thinks like we do. Product, product, product, and the little details matter. We want to sell something that people love to use and creates great value. So I wouldn’t put a number on it, what we see as success is every time one of our users emails us saying how awesome Rollio is or how easy our solution has made their life. In 6-months…we hope to see that even more.
What is the one piece of startup advice that you never got?
You are going to fail…get over it. We hear this way too often, but we don’t really get it until it happens. And when it happens, it feels like a punch to the gut, but you just have to work through it because the feeling of getting through the lows is something that I just can’t describe.
If you could be put in touch with anyone in the New York community who would it be and why?
Oh that’s a tough one… Would be grateful to get to meet Fred Wilson. I’m a huge nerd and fan of Union Square Venture’s Portfolio, plus I would be honored to work with them. Additionally David Kenny from IBM Watson; hope that I don’t have to explain that one.
Why did you launch in New York?
I’m an East Coast guy, played D-1 Hockey at RPI in upstate New York, our awesome investors are here, and it’s motivation when you look out the window.
What’s your favorite restaurant in the city?
Momofuku Ramen, would happily eat it every day.
