SalesTechStar Interview with Micael Oliveira, Founder & CRO at Amplemarket

Micael Oliveira, Founder & CRO at Amplemarket serves up a few proven tips to help B2B sellers drive meaningful customer conversations:

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Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat Micael, tell us about yourself and more about the Amplemarket platform, what inspired the tool and how has it evolved over time.

Thank you for having me! I’m excited to share more about Amplemarket. My name is Micael, and I’m a founder and CRO at Amplemarket. My background is not in sales – actually, I was doing a Ph.D. in Physics before I dropped out to create our startup with my co-founders João (computer scientist) and Luis (physicist). None of us has a sales background, which we believe to be an advantage as this allows us to look at sales-related challenges from a new perspective.

In a nutshell, Amplemarket is an all-in-one sales platform powered by AI. We help companies find, connect and close their next customers. To do this, we collect relevant business-level data and insights and equip sales teams with state-of-the-art prospecting, multi-channel sales engagement and AI workflows so they can drive more meaningful conversation and create more opportunities.

We built Amplemarket to solve our own problems. We were doing sales for our previous startup and noticed that the sales space was really fragmented and that to run a sales motion you had to purchase at least five different tools. These tools did not integrate well with one another, creating a ton of extra manual work for the reps – tasks that didn’t lead to the creation of revenue. We started building internal tools to help us be more efficient, and this turned into Amplemarket.

Our goal is to empower the B2B companies of today with the data and insights they need to drive meaningful conversations and close deals more efficiently.

In today’s challenging marketplace, how are you seeing leading brands revamp their sales processes and sales teams to drive growth?

In the past 10 years, so much about sales has become a “numbers game” – companies have access to cheap leads and cheap automation tools and just end up spamming their prospects without thinking about the timing or relevancy of their messaging. Mailboxes have become noisy, and prospects’ attention is harder and harder to grasp.

In today’s environment, customer revenue is of utmost importance. To drive revenue, companies first need to drive opportunities, and to do so they need to create meaningful conversations.

A good sales process has become a competitive advantage. We’re seeing companies focus on three main things:

1. Leveraging account and prospect-based signals to drive conversations

2. A focus on hyper-personalization, relevant and data-driven approaches

3. Leverage multiple channels email, LinkedIn and phone to start conversations

The most successful brands are leveraging signals to break through the noise and stand out.

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How especially can AI be more crucial at this time in driving brand and sales reps initiatives: can you share a few observations on how you’re seeing leaders in the tech market use AI to their benefit today?

I believe that sales is about to change drastically. The avenue of the new generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models will help companies understand customer needs, preferences and timing. AI is bringing immense value in automating and streamlining repetitive workflows like the ones experienced by sales teams today. As sales motions become more complex, AI and NLP offer the ability to increase the sales team’s productivity and will help the companies that adopt it to grow even faster.

Sales teams will soon be able to connect at the right time with the right message via the right channel. The teams adopting these new technologies will be able to stand out, increasing their chances of converting prospects into paying customers, getting more market share and beating the competition.

One of the reasons we started Amplemarket was because we noticed that so much of the work of a sales team consisted of repetitive tasks that were non-revenue generating. Combining state-of-the-art AI models with human knowledge will create the best-performing sales teams.

What in your view should sales leaders do more of to ensure their sales teams are able to truly optimize ROI from their choice of AI-powered sales tools?

I think sales leaders should really focus on enablement, training, integration and change management. Enablement and training are of utmost importance when it comes to new technologies, especially AI technologies that will really change how sales teams are used to working. Sales leaders need to provide adequate training and education on how these new AI tools will make their reps’ lives easier.

Change management needs to take place, and for these tools to truly be effective, they need to fit seamlessly into your existing sales workflow. This means ensuring they’re compatible with your CRM, email systems and any other key tools your sales team uses daily. The smoother the integration, the higher the likelihood of adoption and sustained use.

Ultimately, these tools should help them create more efficient workflows, which will help people hit and surpass their sales targets.

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What are the first thoughts that come to your mind surrounding the future of AI-powered tools in salestech?

We’re just scratching the surface of what is possible with these new AI tools. I’m really optimistic and believe the future of AI sales is promising and exciting.

The things I’m most excited about revolve around three major areas:

1. Enhanced personalization: When you combine AI with good data, you have the potential to massively improve personalization and relevancy in sales. With a deeper understanding of accounts and prospects, AI can help tailor communication and offerings to individual prospects, improving engagement and conversion rates.
2. Automation and efficiency: AI is extremely interesting to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks in sales. This will ultimately free up time for sales teams to focus on more strategic and meaningful activities. As these technologies continue to evolve, we can expect to see even more tasks being automated, leading to greater efficiency and productivity.
3. Predictive account and prospect signals: AI-powered predictive analytics can help sales teams identify and target the accounts and prospects who are most likely to convert. This level of insight will help sales teams create better sales flows, which will drive better results. Sales teams will no longer need to “spray and pray” and will be able to focus solely on the most relevant and likely to convert accounts.

As AI technologies continue to advance and become more integrated into sales workflows, we can expect to see a significant transformation of the sales roles as we know them today. As a company, we’ve had AI in our DNA since we started and are actively working on products that will help shape the future of sales development.