SalesTechStar Interview with Matt Millen, Co-Founder & President at Regie.ai

Matt Millen, Co-Founder & President at Regie.ai dives into the greater benefits that generative AI will serve sales and marketing teams in this quick chat with SalesTechStar:

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Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat Matt, tell us about yourself and your B2B journey and more about your role at Regie.ai…

I’m Matt Millen, co-founder and president of Regie.ai, the only Generative AI Platform for enterprise sales teams that personalizes content using data unique to a business and its prospects. I started selling in 1987, before the rise of corporate email and the internet, so I’ve had a front-row seat to the infusion of technology into the sales process over decades. I have seen first-hand how technology has solved challenges – but also created new ones.

Before Regie.ai, I was Senior Vice President of Revenue at Outreach. During that time I witnessed content become a major pain point for modern sales teams for two primary reasons. First, engagement at scale: It’s difficult to create content that resonates the same with a wide and diverse audience. Second, personalization: when you create content at scale, it can be difficult to maintain a personal touch if you share one message with many people. Yet creating individually personalized content for each prospect can add hours of work. At the time, there was no technology to help us solve either problem.

That’s when my partner, Srinath Sridhar, and I founded Regie.ai. Regie.ai addresses both of these problems by using AI to generate content that is both engaging and personalized. This helps revenue teams connect with their prospects on a deeper level and close more deals without spending hours creating personalized content from scratch each time. Regie.ai has solved the content bottleneck and elevated engagement at a 1-to-1 scale while preserving personalization in the process.

We’d love to hear about the Regie platform and how it’s evolved over the years?

Regie.ai is a content platform for modern revenue teams that incorporates industry best practices, the latest in AI advancements and workflows centered around the way salespeople do their jobs today.

We were working with Generative AI in 2020, before the current boom and it’s been non-stop evolution ever since.

In the beginning, what we were doing with Regie.ai was more about getting people who weren’t used to Generative AI to gain confidence in its outputs. The first problem Regie.ai solved for the market was building persona based sequencing and cadencing necessary for today’s scaling revenue teams. We had an overwhelmingly positive response from customers who used the capabilities we built for sequences and cadences, and they wanted us to impact rep productivity next.

Because AI is now so advanced and well-known, we’re focused on pushing the boundaries of what is possible to further streamline workflows and increase productivity for sales teams, while driving higher prospect engagement. By studying the rep workflow, we quickly realized that we could increase sales teams’ productivity by offering personalization options at point (in an email inbox, LinkedIn, etc.) and at scale (email tasks in a sales engagement platform). This drastically reduced the time it takes for a sales rep to personalize content so they could use the time back to focus on higher-value tasks.

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How are you seeing generative AI and related trends impact the salestech and martech market today?

There are several layers to the impact of AI and we’re seeing it play out in different ways as the range of options increases and people and organizations move quickly to adopt it. First, we’re seeing that virtually everyone is looking for ways to incorporate AI into their go-to-market motion as they realize the benefits it can have to improving those legacy workflows. Teams are looking to embrace these productivity gains aggressively using AI.

There are two ways in which we reduce the time it takes to do the Sales Development Rep job and increase prospect engagement. First is by streamlining the process of prospect research, which can traditionally tack on hours of work each week for a rep. What would normally take 5-10 minutes to research one buyer can now be accomplished in a matter of seconds using AI. The quicker this part is completed, the more time reps can spend on personalizing targeted outreach. Second, is then utilizing the research to write an engaging email communication to your prospect. This is another task that has been reduced to seconds with the use of AI. At Regie.ai, what we’ve been able to do for the modern seller is take the research and writing processes, combine them in an intelligent workflow and reduce a full 20-minute process to just 37 seconds.

Products and platforms have promised personalization at scale for a while now, but it’s only been successfully achieved now thanks to AI. AI can ingest trillions of data points to produce an experience that is hyper-relevant to the recipient, finally normalizing the trend lines between scalability and personalization. Regie.ai Rapid Writer brings this to life, for instance, by automating highly personalized cold email creation. Harnessing the power of Generative AI, sales teams can now scale their outreach and be more effective when prospecting while spending less time on manual prospect research and email tasks.

What thoughts do you have for the future of these technologies and what sales/marketing teams should be keeping in mind when adopting them as early users?

The future is AI and it’s here to stay. With the rise of digital transformation and a pandemic distancing sellers from their buyers, face-to-face opportunities diminished, leading to a lack of personalized experiences. But Generative AI has arrived to save the day. This technology will continue to support modern sellers and provide workflow support and assistance for the tedious parts of their jobs. This will free up more time for them to interact on a personal level with prospects and customers and strengthen those relationships.

However, early adopters should keep in mind that AI is not perfect and you must work with the AI-generated outputs to make them unique to your needs. Remember AI can get you 75% of the way there, but the best work truly comes out when the human and computer partner together to generate a great output.

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Take us through some of the top personalization faux pas you’ve seen in B2B and what sales teams should keep in mind to drive impact here through 2023?

Personalization is a powerful tool that can help B2B sales teams connect with prospects and drive engagement. However, there are several common faux pas I’ve seen in my years of experience, which can damage relationships you are looking to build through personalized experiences:

• Only personalizing the first message: When people are thoughtfully trying to personalize they tend to just do the first email. But if you look at engagement rates by step, there is a lot of opportunity to personalize later in the funnel with the stacking effect of sequences. A lot of the effort and impact of a sequence can be missed if a rep is not personalizing consistently through that touch pattern.
• Doing too little or too much research: Research is hard, which is why we created Regie.ai to make it easier to research far beyond just overused personalization points on a buyer, like what college they attended. Conversely, some teams spend too much time personalizing, distracting from other high-value activities and compromising top of funnel activity levels.
• Binding the research with the message: No matter how much research you do or don’t do, you still need to find a way to build a bridge into a meaningful message. This isn’t always smooth or a natural skill for sellers, but Regie.ai makes that easier with our Ice Breaker feature. The feature is designed to marry these deep research insights with something you want to talk about with your prospect, instantly.

Can you highlight more about the future of the B2B sales tech market and in what ways you expect to see it grow?

Sales tech will continue to provide new capabilities to streamline workflows. In other words, we’ll see more technology solutions that allow us to do something we couldn’t before, or which help us do something we are

already doing more easily, quickly, or efficiently. The products and platforms will become more robust, and I predict we will need fewer individual pieces of software to execute our day to day operations as a business. Consolidation of features and functionality in our tech stacks will likely occur as a result.

Because of this imminent future, we built Regie.ai as a comprehensive platform, with a built-in CMS, prompt management, and content generation capabilities for the full GTM team, rather than a point solution that solves one problem that could someday become obsolete.