SetSail set out to build a new way to compensate salespeople where, based on data, companies could pay salespeople where they were in the pipeline, not just in one big chunk when they made the sale. They believed that this approach would enable salespeople to take more risks.
Such an approach requires a great deal of data to understand where the sale stands, and data infrastructure turns out to be a wonderful resource for generative AI. Today the company announced new capabilities for asking 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 Levy says his company has learned that in order to build a fair sales compensation system, it required getting the underlying data out of data warehouses. His company built the underlying data layer, and they can display it not only in dashboards with predefined data, now they can leverage that in a different way to answer very specific questions.
“We’ve spent a lot of time in the last three and a half years focusing on a data infrastructure product that ties all these silos together and gives you 360-degree views with dashboards – and then comes ChatGTP and then we realize, hey, this is like another great entry point into our data,” Levy said.
He notes that ChatGPT is not only good at writing text, it can also write code including well-structured SQL queries, which are good enough to replace dashboards with interactive discussions on top of the data.
“We’ve combined the power of GPT with the data infrastructure we’ve built. It just makes you ask yourself, Why do we need dashboards? We don’t need dashboards anymore because we can ask and answer questions directly.”
While he still sees building sales incentives as a viable idea, it turns out that the data infrastructure he built has value even if you weren’t using it for that original purpose. “In order to achieve our original vision,” he said, “we had to create a very unique dataset that automatically tracks everything… and what we found is that the infrastructure itself is of great value to customers.”
So you can start asking specific questions like which deals are about to close, which salespeople are having trouble closing deals and who is meeting with an executive decision maker this week. The system connects to your email, calendars, CRM system, and marketing automation system to build a better picture and answer questions 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 IQ, a new conversational tool that aligns well with SetSail’s new capabilities.
The company was founded in 2018 and has raised nearly $50 million with the latest investment.