Vymo engineering the holy grail of sales productivity
Optimisation is the mantra in today’s highly data-driven world. The quest is not only for optimisation of growth and profitability, but leading an optimised life itself.
Vymo, a predictive sales analytics startup, raised $5 million in Series-A from Sequoia Capital India Advisors late last year, and has been busy strengthening its Engineering team to fine tune its analytics platform and come up with a third version of its personal assistant, the Coach version.
The funding will also help the company fuel growth in international markets and “build a rockstar team,” as Yamini, Co-founder and CEO of Vymo, tells YourStory.
Started by ex-BITS Pilani batchmates Yamini Bhat and Venkat Malladi, Vymo has set ambitious targets for itself ahead, and aims to make the life of sales reps across large corporations easy.
Vymo’s personal sales assistant is specially designed for sales reps and helps them predict what they should do next, detect what she/he has done, learn from what the best reps are doing, and help them improve performance with minimal or no manual intervention. The Coach version goes on to offer personalised coaching and tips for sales reps to be more productive and effective.
Talking about their predictive analytics, Yamini says, “It is contextually aware, proactive, and pre-emptive as compared to CRMs, which are passive data management systems. Vymo predicts what every rep should do next, detects what has been done, and coaches them at the right time with the right advice to beat their targets.”
According to her, engineering is one of Vymo’s biggest costs and competitive advantage. “We have invested in very high-quality talent here, where a small team of 20 product and engineering folks is actually working magic on the product,” she says. The other big cost goes to sales and marketing. “We have been able to amplify our reach--even as a bootstrapped company till recently--because of awesome client success stories and references in the industry,” she adds.
With the rising trend in enterprise mobility, Vymo’s product for sales reps is timed perfectly. Vymo is deployed with large enterprises like HDFC Bank, SBI Life, and new-age startups like Treebo and Vakilsearch. “Our client feedback is solid! Most clients have 65-85 percent daily usage of Vymo and that is 5X more than a typical CRM can claim. We rarely have churn and most clients have now either added more users or deployed in more scenarios,” she says.
The company’s underlying platform makes is easy to configure for any enterprise workflow, whether it is sales or service. It has more sales deployments, given it directly impacts top line for clients. Typical clients use it for lead management, partner or customer relationship management, activity management as well as service workflows like customer on-boarding, service installation, service ticket handling, and collections.
Vymo is uniquely differentiated in that it offers lead scoring, predictive calendaring and automatically captures sales activities. There are many other enhancements around geo-intelligence, A/B testing interventions with field reps that are in the pipeline and has received very positive customer feedback even in limited rollouts.
Sujay Koduri, VP Engineering, who has been instrumental in building the tech team, added,
“Vymo as a multi-tenanted SaaS product using cutting edge technologies, we rely on React Native for our mobile apps and our service backend relies on Mongo, Kafka among other things. And since data-driven intelligence is key in our business, we have an in-house data engineering team that is building a data infrastructure that allows our customers to slice-and-dice data as they like.”
The engineering team comes with a very deep experience across user engagement, platform, and performance, multi-tenant/micro-service led architecture. “Several of our engineers have seen this phase of a startup's journey, and know what to pre-empt in terms of product/engineering mistakes,” adds Yamini.
To keep up with their mobile and digital strategy, big corporations and small startups have to rely on data and predictive analytics. Besides helping their sales reps with lead generation, calendering, and lead allocation, coaching real time is important to ensure they meet their key result area goals.
Says Venkat Mallad, Co-founder and CTO of the company, “Every CEO and sales leader worries if their direct or indirect sales teams are effective. In an ideal world, the best sales coach would be available on-tap to the sales rep. That’s what the Vymo Coach aspires to offer - personalised, in-time, contextual coaching for sales reps to be most effective.”
According to Yamini, some of their best product ideas have come from engineer-customer conversations. She attributes this to the organisation structure and culture. “Our whole organisation is divided into business pods and not as functional teams. These multi-functional pods are exposed to their end-users and drive specific business goals. Engineers actually understand what their customers want and how their work makes us competitive. We take pride in the fact that our engineers identify and prioritise features driven by their intimate understanding of the customer.”
While working with McKinsey, Yamini realised that typically organisations take about two years from the time they decide to invest in technology to enable sales to when the technology is actually deployed and yields results for the organisation. “We wanted to create a solution that was very easy to use and doesn’t help just the organisation, but also the sales reps using it right from when they start,” she adds.
