SalesTechStar Interview with Manisha Raisinghani, Founder of SiftHub

Manisha Raisinghani, Founder of SiftHub discusses more on how AI can reduce discrepancies in sales processes while taking us through SiftHub’s latest funding round and the road ahead for the platform:

___________

Welcome to this SalesTech Series chat, Manisha, tell us about yourself and more on what inspired SiftHub?

Over the last 2 decades, we’ve created this problem where for every small thing there’s a different application using a different data structure and different cloud leading to hopelessly scattered knowledge. It’s a complex problem to solve.

Information overload from ad campaigns, email marketing, and a company’s website means that prospects are equipped with more than a basic understanding of a product or service before a sales meeting. This means sellers need deeper product knowledge and easy access to proprietary company information to win new customers. However, the current sales tech stack does not support this foundational shift in the role of sales and presales teams.

After speaking to 200+ leaders who only validated the seriousness of this problem, it dawned on me that it’s completely unreasonable to expect sales and presales professionals to memorize all the ins and outs of the product in order to be able to respond to clients with complex technical details. Trying to find up-to-date accurate information when it is scattered across Slack, Gmail, Drive, HubSpot, Confluence, and more is incredibly difficult. The fact that sales spends only 30% of their time selling cries for a change – and that’s where our platform comes in.

How has the journey been since starting up and can you tell us more about your recent funding: what are the next steps in terms of your product roadmap and also; as a startup founder: what were some of the top challenges you faced while seeking funding?

From the get-go, I knew I did not want to dive into building the product without fully understanding the critical painpoint. We spent the first few months of the SiftHub journey doing several user interviews with sales and presales professionals, building and refining our platform to ensure it did not become yet another tool sales teams felt pressured to use. Instead, we wanted to be their vehicle to improving productivity and cutting down time spent on repetitive administrative tasks. In that time, I also focused on building a strong core team for SiftHub – experienced individuals to lead each function including a few seasoned SaaS ex-founders.

We launched our platform with a select group of early adopters 2 months ago, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. From day one of demos, our platform has wow-ed prospects and helped them improve productivity by up to 80%.

On April 3rd, we announced our seed funding round of $5.5 million led by Matrix Partners India and Blume Ventures with participation from Neon Fund and executive operators and founders from Superhuman, Cloudflare, DevRev, RazorPay, and SuperOps. Ultimately, our goal is for the SiftHub platform to be integral in the day-to-day operations of a salesperson and a solutions engineer. We want to help sales teams get back to doing what they do best – selling, while we help them take care of everything else.

As a second-time founder, I’ve been fortunate in that investors have complete confidence in my ability to build and scale a SaaS company. In addition to that, a lot of investors are interested in the market opportunity presented by the rise of AI implementation across businesses and a strong AI-native platform like SiftHub that catered to a critical painpoint made for a safe investment.

Read More: SalesTechStar Interview with Laura Zwahlen, Chief Revenue Officer at NextRoll

How are you seeing the market for AI in SalesTech change the game for end users as well as influence how salestech as a segment is set to evolve?

Today, only 28% of a salesperson’s time is actually spent on selling. The majority of their time goes in dealing with an overwhelming number of salestech solutions (an average of 10+ solutions per sales team) to perform repetitive administrative tasks leaving them with less time for relationship building.

AI has come to be accepted as a way to combat this discrepancy and the effective implementation of AI is now the focus of all leadership teams. However, this only puts sales professionals under more pressure to reskill and train themselves in order to learn how to use AI effectively. According to BCG research, 51% of sellers believe that reskilling is necessary to partner effectively with GenAI.

We believe that with AI-first solutions like SiftHub, sales teams will now be able to boost productivity through AI with no additional training necessary. This will ultimately gift time back to sellers to allow them to build stronger relationships with their customers.

Can you talk about some of the biggest challenges you see current B2B sales teams face when implementing AI to drive their processes and efforts?

There are 3 major challenges that I think B2B sales teams face when implementing AI, and I’ll go into them in a bit more detail below:

1. Majority of salestech solutions in the market currently incorporate AI superficially, mimicking use-cases that tools like ChatGPT or Jasper AI already solve for. Their main aim in offering an ‘AI-aspect’ to their product is to try and keep users from jumping from their tool to others to perform specific tasks. However, they often fail in this as their AI capabilities are not as robust or dependent as AI-native solutions.
2. AI is still not considered trustworthy. Companies today are looking for trustworthy partners who will help elevate their AI game without compromising on security and compliance.
3. When salespeople are responding to customer information requests, they often don’t have the time to verify each and every answer. This means they need an information source that they can trust not to hallucinate, whose answers are grounded in company knowledge. A majority of publicly available GenAI tools have the tendency to embellish details to include false information in order to respond satisfactorily to a particular question – which can be a huge problem.

What are your views on the future of B2B sales and salestech? What trends will dominate sales in B2B tech?

We envision a future where our platform takes care of all the non-human elements of a sales deal on the seller’s side – from getting all the necessary facts about their product, platform, security policies, privacy policies, legal terms, company overview, etc. to filling out all forms needed from the buyers’ side for the deal to progress. By enabling an almost autonomous sales process, we allow sales teams to focus on the human side of their jobs – building relationships with their prospects. This will ultimately help increase the business’s top line.

Some of the trends I expect to see dominate sales in 2024 are:

• The application of AI in sales will continue to accelerate and sales teams will look to automate as many aspects of their sales process as possible.
• Highly personalized and targeted account based selling will continue to grow stronger. Hyper-personalized experiences for each buyer will become the norm in B2B sales – and to allow for this, sales teams need to leverage data and analytics to understand their customer’s unique needs and tailor their sales pitches accordingly.
• The focus of sales teams is shifting from selling products to solving customer problems. B2B tech sales is becoming more consultative, with sales professionals being viewed as trusted advisors who will help businesses achieve their goals rather than vendors.
• Knowledge is king. Companies that are able to harness and leverage all the content and knowledge they have on hand effectively will stand out from competitors.

Read More: Sales Performance Management Software: Tracking, Reporting, and Incentive Programs