How this SaaS startup is helping large enterprises upskill and connect with their sales representatives

With many large companies having a widely distributed sales representatives network, there arises a need to ensure that the personnel – who may either be the company’s employees or those of its channel partners – are up to date, and have full knowledge about the product information as well as the company at any given point. 

Organisations require salespersons to be abreast of the competition as well, keeping in mind that clients can source information about rivals and the products in an instant.  

This puts a strain on the companies to ensure that they are not just sales-ready, but are experts in the space. Traditionally, companies mandate salespersons to take e-learning courses which often don’t take upskilling into account. 

Enter Singapore-based StreamzAI that offers AI-led SaaS solutions to help companies train, upskill, and engage their widely distributed sales teams, with a special focus on deskless sales teams. 

“We are a sales readiness SaaS platform and cater to large enterprises. We enable upskilling using AI through personalised interventions,” Jawahar Kanjilal, Co-founder of Streamz.ai, tells YourStory.

Founded in 2015 by Jawahar, Sandeep Shrivastava and Kushal Bhomick, the startup’s clients include seven large enterprises  – including Castrol, HMD Global, Bata, and Lenovo – that have deployed its SaaS platform in 74 countries. 

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What does it do

Streamz enables large enterprises across the globe to deploy sales readiness programmes at a country level, and localise for a particular country. The startup manages this at regional offices with an aim to give managers clear visibility to cover people on the field. 

“Our software works on an ‘always on’ paradigm through a mobile app used by sales representatives,” explains Jawahar. 

As the startup targets deskless sales representatives who are on the field, it uses mobile apps to not just help them stay on their feet but for upskilling. 

Streamz’ software uses AI to capture the knowledge level of the sales representatives and maintains a skill graph on the same. Based on the data, it recommends contents to fill the knowledge gap of each individual, explains Jawahar. The content is consumed through bite-sized cards. 

With very minimal human intervention, the startup aims to plug the knowledge gap using AI-based nudging, incentives, and a gamification framework to motivate users. 

For instance, Streamz collects sales performance from other systems such as Salesforce CRM. This allows the software to capture the individual's performance to map it to their learning behaviour and create composite incentives.

This unique feature, according to Jawahar, lets users know where they lag and where they need to catch up to achieve their quotas. 

“Our sales-readiness system not just enables users to keep reading, but to also drive sales performance using our training,” he adds. 

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Meet the team

Completely bootstrapped, Streamz is a 40-member team, with close to 34 employees in India. Its founding team have previously worked with Nokia, OnMobile, and Oracle. 

After stepping down from Nokia as Vice President, Global Head Nokia Life Tools, Emerging Market Services in 2014, Jawahar went on to co-found Streamz. Apart from being part of Life Tools, now called Nokia Life, he was also known for signing the world’s first digital music deal in 1998. 

“Streamz has a very strong correlation or background to what I was doing in Nokia in my last assignment,” explains Jawahar on why he started Streamz. 

In his last assignment, Jawahar was Global Head and Creator of Nokia Life Tools, an innovative portfolio of livelihood and life improvement mobile services for emerging markets. Using this platform, it connected close to 125 million users across the world (2009-2013), offering information on a wide range of topics – from agriculture to entertainment – through SMS-based subscriptions.  

After working on a scale as big as Life Tools, “I wondered where else could I use all the expertise that we have gained as a team and we could see the sales enablement for enterprises is a very big challenge, especially when you have large distributed teams,” he adds. 

As this showed the demand in the market, Jawahar and his team decided to build something similar that enabled large enterprises to be connected to the agents at the bottom, and ensure that they are informed on any topic related to the company. 

Sandeep, who heads the product team as Chief Product Officer at Streamz, was Vice-president of OnMobile. He also had a tenure of two years as the Director, Search in Microsoft, a year and a half as Director, Portfolio and Product Management, Nokia Life Tools. He worked for close to six years as Director, Product Management at Yahoo. 

Kushal, who heads the Enterprise Sales Team as Chief Revenue Officer, has close to 11 years of experience as Senior Director, Head of Sales, Analytical Applications, JAPAC in Oracle.  

In the leadership team, they are also joined by Christy George, former Senior Vice President, Engineering, OnMobile Global, as Chief Technology Officer and NK Chari, former Worldwide Marketing Director at Keysight and Agilent, as their Chief Marketing Officer. 

“Our backgrounds allowed us to face all the initial challenges with a sprite,” quips Jawahar. The company turned positive in revenue in the third year of its inception. 

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Looking into the market 

The product-based sales training market is poised to grow by $1.66 billion during 2021-2025, progressing at a CAGR of 5.41 percent, according to Global Product-based Sales Training Market 2021-2025 report. 

The market is fragmented, and the degree of fragmentation will accelerate during the forecast period, said the report. 

“We want to take advantage of the positive environment and grow very fast,” adds Jawahar. The startup has a plan to expand aggressively and raise funds to support its expansion plans. 

It competes with companies like the US-based sales enablement platform Brainshark and India-based product training platform Outsell.