set sail He set out to build a new way to compensate sellers, where, based on data, companies could pay sellers when they were in the pipeline, not just in large part when they landed the sale. They believed that this approach would allow sellers to take more risk.
Such an approach requires a lot of data to understand where the sales process is, and it turns out that the data infrastructure is a great source for generative AI. Today, the company announced new capabilities to ask the system questions in natural language, which in turn is translated into an SQL query and provides an answer.
SetSail co-founder and CEO Haggai Levi says his company learned that in order to build a fair sales compensation system, key data needed to be moved out of data silos. His company built the underlying data layer and could display it not just in dashboards with predefined data, now they could leverage that in a different way to answer very precise questions.
“We spent a lot of time over the last three and a half years focusing on that data infrastructure product that connects all these silos and gives you 360-degree views using dashboards, and then ChatGTP comes along and then we realize, hey, this is as another great entry point to our data,” Levi said.
He points out that ChatGPT is not only good at writing text, but can also write code that includes well-structured SQL queries, which are good enough to replace whiteboards with interactive discussions about the data.
“We have merged the power of GPT with the data infrastructure we created. It just makes you wonder, why do we need dashboards? We no longer need boards because we can ask the questions and answer them directly,” she said.
While you still see creating sales incentives as a viable idea, it turns out that the data infrastructure you’ve built has value, even if you’re not using it for that original purpose. “To fulfill our original vision, we had to create a single data set that automatically tracks everything…and what we found was that the infrastructure itself has a lot of value to customers,” he said.
So you can start asking specific questions, like which deals are close to closing, which salespeople are having trouble closing deals, and who’s meeting with an executive decision-maker this week. The system connects to email, calendars, CRM, marketing automation system to create a picture and answer questions better than just looking at data points on a dashboard.
In addition to these new capabilities, the company also announced an $11 million investment led by Zoom Ventures, which recently announced zoom ICa new chat tool that actually aligns well with the new capabilities of SetSail.
The company was founded in 2018 and has raised nearly $50 million with the latest investment.
