SalesTechStar Interview with Yamini Bhat, CEO and Co-founder of Vymo

Yamini Bhat, CEO and Co-founder of Vymo chats about the core tools that most sales stacks should comprise of:

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Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat Yamini, tell us more about Vymo and what inspired the platform?

As a consultant at McKinsey earlier, I worked on sales transformation programs for Fortune 100/500 banks and financial services companies across Asia and the US. And it became apparent to me then that conventional CRMs had to evolve to meet the needs of the modern seller. I started Vymo with Venkat, my buddy from college, who at the time was leading the mobile team at Google in Palo Alto and was working on prescriptive technologies. Vymo is a marriage of these two worlds: enterprise and consumer, and is used by over 250,000 salespeople in 65+ leading financial institutions like AIA, Berkshire Hathaway, Generali, HDFC and Sunlife across the US, Asia and Japan.

Think of Vymo as a personal assistant that captures activities such as calls, meetings and emails automatically so salespeople don’t have to report them manually, AND a personal coach that nudges intelligent next best actions like what customers or partners to engage and what activities to do contextually to improve outcomes.

Vymo integrates with leading CRMs like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics and has a daily active usage of over 75%, which is one of the highest for enterprise applications. We have raised $45M of funding across 3 rounds from Sequoia Capital, Emergence Capital and Bertelsmann Investments. We are also recognized by Gartner, Forrester and CB Insights.

How have you been seeing key sales engagement practices and trends evolve in today’s B2B market? What near-future predictions do you have surrounding the use of sales engagement tools?

A couple of thoughts on B2B sales specifically: with product-led growth, salespeople have to add solutioning and customer success skills to their arsenal if they expect their free trials to translate to full-fledged contracts. Larger opportunities will require a consultative approach and personalized proposals will play a bigger role.

The pandemic has accelerated digital adoption. But customers also need trusted advisors who can learn their context and advise them. Businesses will also focus on elevating their sales reps/agents to the role of advisors to help customers navigate complex buying decisions.

Sales engagement tools not only have to provide a bunch of executable plays to AEs and SDRs that can standardize playbooks but also move from system of record to system of insights so that they can earn their place in the sales stack.

I see sales engagement tools becoming more verticalized to serve specific industry use cases (as Vymo is for banking, insurance and financial services), and brining both sales and customer interactions onto a single platform so organizations can complete the loop on customer experience

Read More:  Vymo Raises Series C Funding to Empower Remote Sales Teams

With the rapid innovations in salestech, it can sometimes be difficult for salespeople to keep up, what tips would you share with sales teams looking to revisit their salestech stacks?

With an extensive range of SaaS tools available for sales teams to build a sales tech stack, it can get challenging and overwhelming with every new tool that comes into the market.

The essential eggs in the basket should be:

1. Data: Any tech stack should be centered around data. If there is no foundation of intelligent data, irrespective of which fancy tool we’re using, the tech stack will fail to fetch you the productivity levels you desire.
2. Adoption: The tool should be intuitive, swift and easy to use. The tool may provide excellent capabilities, but if the sales rep is not able to get what he needs within a few clicks, swipes – it won’t work.
3. Outcomes: digital transformation leaders should work closely with business to move beyond implementations and ensure quick wins that offer tangible benefits to adopting another application to the stack.

As companies strengthen their hybrid/return to office models: what type of tools should be evaluated to ensure constant synergy between office-hybrid staff in your view?

When the pandemic disrupted services, we identified the top three challenges our existing clients were facing and needed immediate help in resolving:

1. Business process continuity
2. Mitigating risks
3. Data safety

Within two weeks, we developed Vymo’s WFH module to enable banking and financial services leaders to overcome the challenges of a virtual team by revisiting BAU (business as usual) processes, driving virtual customer relationships, and offering visibility & control into daily sales activities. This module includes features that enable reps to retain the depth and frequency of customer engagements, such as priority task-list uploads directly to agents’ calendars, click-to-call via Zoom or WhatsApp, CSAT surveys. It also includes top-down broadcasts and notifications, team barometer surveys with feedback rolled up to management, a WFH command center dashboard for managers and more.

This roll-out helped thousands of users in our customer deployments to move to remote operations, seamlessly.

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We’d love to hear more about the evolutions in store for the Vymo platform and what users can expect down the line?

Vymo aims to be the most comprehensive sales engagement platform. This year we are continuing to focus on the following three themes,

• Visibility: With Vymo, sales users will be able to identify and record lead/customer engagements. Sales Managers will have access to real-time insights into their team’s activities and outcomes. We deliver these capabilities by becoming the single-pane-of glass sales engagement interface for all your frontline sales people.
• Winning Behaviors: We enable sales managers and leaders to identify outcome-enhancing sales activity patterns across the organization, and provide the infrastructure to drive these behavioral shifts across teams. We do this with our advanced Nudge Platform that drives goal compliance and gamifies the sales process.
• Enterprise grade: We are continually expanding the capabilities of our platform to meet the evolving needs of our enterprise customers. So that we can be their long-term technology partners and drive growth. A delightful user experience, security and reliable infrastructure are at the core of our development efforts.

Some of the highlights from our product usage over recent months include:

• Over 3 million nudges delivered every month; user acceptance rates on these nudges are a staggering 2x-7x better than industry average!
• Users log multiple sessions of 5-8 mins each session and our daily time spend is almost 1 hour (in comparison to Facebook at approximately 50 mins)
• Our net promoter score is 43 (benchmark for enterprise software globally is around 23)

Some last thoughts, takeaways, digital sales/customer communication tips and best practices before we wrap up!

Best practices as always: put the customer first, be context aware, and play the long game.

The last couple of years have been extremely challenging for all of us – we have been tested to the hilt! But, hopefully the worst is behind us and we can move on from here; more resilient, more innovative, and more empathetic. I hope people don’t forget the lessons of the pandemic too quickly and I wish all the readers a fantastic year! Crush it!

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