SalesTechStar Interview with Shaun Shirazian, Chief Product Officer at Pipedrive
In this exclusive with SalesTechStar; Shaun Shirazian, Chief Product Officer at Pipedrive chats about Pipedrive’s new GenAI and predictive capabilities:
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Tell us about yourself and your role at Pipedrive
As the Chief Product Officer at Pipedrive, my primary responsibility is to develop the company’s product strategy and lead product teams across global markets. I joined Pipedrive in December 2021 after twelve years at Intuit, where I spent my time starting and scaling various products and solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. During the latter half of my time there, I led product teams across Brazil, the UK, the Americas, and EMEA. I also spent time spearheading growth in emerging markets for QuickBooks at Intuit, which gave me valuable insight into the nuances of the SMB landscape at a global scale.
Now, at Pipedrive, I develop some of the most exciting products for our small business partners, which are essential to the global economy. I ensure that our product and localization teams are designing new tools to help improve sales functions across SMB industries. This past April, we launched an incredibly exciting project – Pipedrive AI, to fast-track tasks across sales, simplify communication, and help teams effectively close more deals.
We’d love to hear about Pipedrive’s latest GenAI powered suite and how it changes the game for end users
The Open AI-powered suite is helping our customers become more efficient than ever, and I see it becoming crucial for growing small businesses.
The pocket sales assistant tool—one of my favorite parts of the suite—can analyze sales data from pipelines, suggesting deals with a higher probability of success and recommending the deals with the highest conversion potential.
Our Write My Email Using AI feature pulls together compelling cold emails, follow-ups, and proposals. After customers feed in key information, it takes a median of 44 seconds to send an AI-generated email, compared to the median of nine minutes it takes to write one without our AI integration. Customers can also benefit from the AI summarization feature, making sifting through inboxes much more efficient. At the click of a button, users can generate a concise summary of an email thread to generate potential next steps.
The AI-driven Smart App Recommendations enhances efficiency and revenue streams by suggesting top-tier apps tailored to company usage patterns and industry trends. And finally, the Marketplace Search feature improves search accuracy through natural language integration to reduce empty results.
The main thing to note, though, is that these features are incredibly easy to use, even for a sales beginner.
How are you seeing GenAI impact the sales and marketing sphere today?
As with most industries, marketers worldwide are seeing AI’s disruptive potential in their space. That said, it’s important to note that AI is not a catch-all for solving all business challenges, and today’s AI is more like a co-pilot than an automation expert. There still needs to be a degree of human intelligence to ensure that the right AI models are being used on the right challenges. Understanding how to word prompts is key to getting the most out of the technology.
When these tools are optimized, the power of AI allows teams to easily identify high-potential leads based on hundreds of thousands of data points across industries, locations, sales cycles, and price points–we just couldn’t do that before we had access to this type of technology. These actions enable teams to find the ideal customer profile to target, which is game-changing for smaller businesses.
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What are some of the factors/pointers you feel sales and marketing leaders should keep in mind when using AI-powered sales tech and martech to drive outcomes?
No matter how quickly AI-powered salestech and martech take off, the human element will always be relevant. AI and technology will continue to be helpful tools when it comes to automating tasks and filtering through data to connect the dots, but there’s something to be said about human interaction as well–especially in terms of understanding customer needs and establishing trust. I believe a mix of the two is crucial to making sense of all the nuances of building and forging genuine, long-lasting customer relationships.
Moreover, it’s easy these days to fall into the AI-washing trap, where companies simply append the term AI to the beginning or end of every product, thinking it adds meaningful value. You can slap AI onto anything, but that’s not what makes the difference. At Pipedrive, what truly matters to us is a genuine commitment to advancing our mission: to empower our clients and small businesses to grow and reach their fullest potential. Many leaders are grappling with how to keep up with the AI hype, so the most important thing to bear in mind when searching for AI tools and solutions is to delve into the main core of an AI tool’s purpose and ensure it doesn’t impact customer connections negatively.
Can you bust five of the biggest misconceptions surrounding AI and its impact on sales and marketing?
- AI will replace marketers – One of the biggest misconceptions I see is that AI will replace marketers and the belief that AI will homogenize sales and eliminate the personal element. The role humans play isn’t going anywhere. AI really serves to enhance the human part of CRM, not replace or diminish it. While the future of sales might be powered by AI, relationships between the customer and the marketer will always be guided by human beings.
- AI is only for big business – There’s also the fallible belief that AI is only for big business. In reality, AI has become more accessible and affordable as new developments are made. Small businesses can really benefit from AI like Pipedrive’s to give them a leg up when competing with larger companies by increasing operational efficiency.
- AI is hard to use – I think the concept of AI can come across as intimidating to small businesses because people have a preconceived idea that AI is complicated to operate. In reality, most people use AI every day, and they don’t even know it. It powers a lot of the apps and tech we use day-to-day and these platforms are fairly simple to use once people get familiar with them. Pipedrive AI’s user interface is easy to understand and integrates with existing functions, giving customers the ability to get the hang of the product suite in just a few minutes.
- Every business should be developing an AI product – In the last few years, every company has seemingly felt the need to have an AI product. I think businesses can and should be more thoughtful about this and ask themselves: “What value would adding AI to this product actually bring the end-user?”. Pipedrive is dedicated to offering our customers a comprehensive set of tools from which they’ll actually benefit, and that’s why we’re very selective regarding the components of our platform that we choose to integrate with AI.
- AI is only suitable for certain industries – Some marketers believe that AI in marketing is only suitable for certain industries. However, AI can have incredibly diverse applications in consumer, B2B, and everything in between. Whether it’s for selling physical products, offering services, or promoting a cause, AI can help marketers understand customer behavior and optimize advertising campaigns, regardless of the industry they’re in. Not all AI models are created equally, but educating yourself on the best tools for various challenges can create a real difference for any use case.
What are some of the top AI enhancements across B2B SaaS that have piqued your interest over the recent years?
In my opinion, the predictive analytics aspect of AI has truly revolutionized the B2B space. AI’s ability to sift through data and offer a meaningful recommendation within seconds is incredibly powerful and useful for all businesses, particularly for small businesses that may lack the additional manpower to dedicate time to analyzing that data. We’re entering into a phase of optimal efficiency for sales teams that we’ve never experienced before, and I’m really excited to see how it changes the industry for the better.
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Founded in 2010, Pipedrive is an easy and effective sales CRM that drives small business growth.
Shaun Shirazian is the CPO at Pipedrive, responsible for developing and executing the company’s product journey, leading product teams, and localization across global markets. Shaun Shirazian joined Pipedrive from Intuit, where he spent 12 years starting and scaling a variety of products and businesses aimed at helping small and medium-sized businesses thrive. For the last six years at Intuit, he worked in Brazil and the UK, leading product teams across the Americas and EMEA. Most recently, he was the Country Manager for the Rest of World business at QuickBooks. Before that, he spent four years at Procter & Gamble in Brand Management.
