The SaaS Co., a startup that helps Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies with B2B sales, has raised €800,000 in seed funding, money it plans to use to further develop its AI-driven sales assistant. Backing the round are various unnamed angel investors, along with the European Union via a €300,000 grant.
Born out of the company’s own frustrations, in terms of how you can better scale sales, The SaaS Co. is developing a product called ‘LISA‘ (Learning Intelligent Sales Agent), an AI-powered sales assistant that claims to be able to automate a part of the sales process.
It works by cc’ing LISA into sales emails you send so that emails are automatically categorised based on sentiment (positive or negative reply etc.) and intent, and draft replies can be written on your behalf. The idea is to regain some of the time sales people typically spend replying to emails, regardless how likely a sale is to convert.
Always be closing is the mantra, and in LISA’s case that can literally be true. You can set the email sales assistant, which is free to use while The SaaS Co. continues developing the machine learning technology, to work autonomously, presuming you trust its AI enough in the first place.
“Using email campaigns ourselves, we’ve realized that our salespeople spend too much time answering all the messages, even if there is no sign of positivity in them,” explains the company. “But actually, that’s a problem that all of you sellers have: thousands of emails to answer and thousands of emails to categorize and sort through. You don’t need to be a genius to realize that this is time-consuming and doesn’t bring in any money”.
From what I can tell, LISA is designed to work best alongside email marketing campaigns that then produce in-bound enquiries that its AI can sufficiently handle. “She aims to scale the process of replying to individual responses received from customers during your email campaigns, by automating the categorization of responses and by writing replies for you,” says The SaaS Co. of its bot.
Meanwhile, The SaaS Co. says it plans to use the new funding for product development, to hire additional talent, and to fund marketing. “Our goal for LISA is simple: to free salespeople from repetitive tasks so they can focus on creative ways to make their sales”, says The SaaS Co.’s CEO Peter Schlecht in a statement.
