Chat bots for b2b sales reps?

I was honored to be included on this list of ‘Top 6 Movers and Shakers in Sales Enablement’ by Conor Gilligan from 20-Apr-2016.

My list of Sales Enablement vendors kept growing.

Recent additions are

Brick Street Software brickstreetsoftware.com CONNECT: multichannel marketing (incl. SMS) for carrying on conversations with customers & prospects over multiple devices as they go about their day. With its single platform architecture, you have unified views of each consumer—across all channels to engage, drive sales, & develop loyal relationships. Offices in Toronto, Boston & elsewhere. Founder moved on to botco.ai botco.ai @botcoai conversational marketing platform enabling meaningful & intelligent conversations between businesses & their customers. CA, US

Bsharp bsharpcorp.com @bsharpcorp,

ContexTip contextip.com @contextip,

Nolinio nolinio.com @nolinio,

Promatum promatum.com @PromatumEE

and this addition to my list of Canada based Sales Enablement companies:

Vidyard vidyard.com @vidyard video solution to help you close even the toughest of deals more quickly & easily. Tools & data you need to maximize audience engagement, convert prospects through the sales funnel, & measure the true impact of video. Access all your video content from mobile or desktop; Hand-pick the ones that are perfect for the specific lead; Create a custom video playlist; Record a friendly, personalized video greeting if you wish; Create & send an email using well-designed layouts; Track who is watching what to gain insights on leads & close them more quickly & easily. Kitchener/Waterloo, ON, Canada

26-Jan-2016, Vidyard announced it closed a $35m series C round led by Battery Ventures, with existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures, OMERS Ventures, iNovia Capital, & SoftTech VC.

The future, according to Vidyard, “is about ignoring vanity metrics. Instead, businesses that move toward creating original video content to support every stage of the buying cycle need to focus on the metrics that help to explain customer behavior.” “View counts don’t do much to help you identify which buyers are the most interested in your products or services,”

21-Apr-2016, Paul Alex Gray spoke at #BotTO (event in Toronto on chatbots, AI, messaging, etc) outlining the transition from web to mobile to bots.

“Messaging: powers two-way interactions.

Bots: enable you to personalize experiences at scale.”

Photo above by Ian Gerald King slide by Paul Alex Gray

I’m not posting this as a statement that b2b sales reps are going away, but could see nice applications (bots) that automate [personalize at scale] the enablement of the sales rep with marketing/training content for her/his sales situation.