The administrative burden of updating customer relationship management systems after each conversation prevents salespeople from focusing on making sales calls. Attention‘s sales assistant aims to change that by using artificial intelligence and natural language processing to record call details and compose follow-up emails without any human intervention.

Eniac Ventures led the $3.1 million funding round for the New York City firm, which also included contributions from Frst, Liquid2 Ventures, Maschmeyer Group Ventures, and Ride Ventures. Ramp, Pawp, Truework, and CBInsights all had their founding teams participate in this funding round.

CEO Anis Bennaceur and CTO Matthias Wickenburg created Attention in September 2021. Both Swipecast and Mixer are online marketplaces where creative workers may find work, and the two met while managing these businesses. After five years of competition, the two companies met for coffee and discovered they share many of the same sales difficulties, including the need to regularly update Salesforce and swiftly integrate new sales representatives.

“After much back and forth, we agreed to work together,” Bennaceur explained. While Matthias was building the solutions, I had hundreds of interactions with sales managers and junior sales reps, during which I learned about their problems, dug into the possible answers they wanted, and iterated relentlessly. We finally realised we were on to something after several revisions.

As a tool, Attention facilitates “CRM hygiene,” the practise of keeping customer relationship management (CRM) software current with accurate data. Bennaceur highlights the significance of this by noting that CROs and VPs of Sales utilise CRM software to record communications with clients, organise prospects, and examine sales statistics. They can then choose the best course of action to maximise profits.

However, there are a number of obstacles to practising good CRM hygiene. One problem is that it requires salespeople to spend a lot of time on paperwork that may be avoided. When salespeople move on from their positions or hand over accounts to others, information might be lost. As a result, opportunities are missed and customers are lost. Last but not least, revenue directors have a more difficult time selecting how to move potential transactions if they have no ability to track what is said during sales conversations.

Thankfully, Attention eliminates this problem by sending call logs directly to CRMs. Attention knows if each phase of the MEDDIC sales methodology’s six-step structure of questions has been covered in a discussion, and exports that information into the appropriate Salesforce or Hubspot fields. In addition to relieving salespeople of administrative tasks, this also helps managers see where their company is in terms of sales leads and income prospects.

Additionally, Attention may extract material for sales coaching from calls by utilising NLP. It shows battlecards in real time to assist sales professionals think of what to say during a call. Consider the following scenario: “A potential customer has asked you how your company stacks up against the competition in terms of a certain competency. “As you’re having that discussion, a battlecard pops up on your screen with the information you need to provide a good answer to that topic.” — Bennaceur.

Sales teams need to send many emails fast in order to boost deal velocity, which is the rate at which a sales organisation can negotiate and execute contracts. Bennaceur notes that while tailored emails might be more convenient, they sometimes exclude crucial information since they are based on a pre-written template. As a follow-up to phone calls, Attention can write relevant emails depending on what was discussed. The sales representative might ask Attention to “create an email summarising our talk,” for instance. Describe the problems our target audience has and how our product can solve them. and plan the following steps.”

Competitors to Attention that also analyse consumer interactions include Gong and Chorus. According to Bennaceur, Attention’s strength lies in its adaptability to comprehend discussions, its ability to provide real-time prompts during contacts, and its provision of A/B testing for its coaching. They don’t have the same level of flexibility that we do when it comes to exporting discussions into customer relationship management systems, he added, giving them a significant advantage.

The CEO of Eniac Ventures, Hadley Harris, released a statement on the investment, saying, “We’re thrilled to partner with Anis and Matthias as they leverage the latest developments in AI generation and natural language understanding to superpower sales organizations. We love working with repeat founders and couldn’t be happier with the strong pull they’re already getting from the market.”