Jim Kaskade, CEO at Conversica - AITech Interview

Posted 2025-02-25 08:55:37

In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges that CMOs and CSOs face during these slow sales periods, and how can AI alleviate some of this stress?

Revenue growth is hard. The biggest challenge for C-suite is understanding where and how to deploy AI automation. For revenue teams, you can provide insights to your sellers, AND you can augment your sellers with AI-enabled selling velocity. This means that AI can be either your “co-pilot”, giving suggestions to the sellers; or this means that the AI becomes a seller (aka “pilot”) engaging your customer prospects and existing customers directly. The idea of putting your most important asset, customers, in the hands of AI is scary. So, how does c-suite get comfortable with this, especially if the AI goes rogue? Answer, you can’t unless your vendor/partner can guarantee “brand safe” AI experiences. This is where Conversica excites me the most. We’re the Forrester Wave leader because we’re 100% brand safe. Period.

Could you share how AI is helping sales teams proactively engage with potential buyers and how this impacts overall sales performance?

Rachel is your BEST employee. She engages your prospect clients who are simply discovering your brand, learning about you. She can also field any question about your products and services with information about your business at all depths. She can outbound, turning outreach into high quality inbounds. She knows how to warm up target accounts for your sales team. She can also go after aged lead stock, driving new interest. Any former customer that you lost, is a target she loves to reenergize. She also knows how to have authentic conversations with any type of customer at any level, building rapport, and surfacing handraisers. She knows how to pre-qualify, validating fit, and then scheduling only the right candidates for sales meetings. Post-transaction, she will proactively engage & schedule account reviews, reach out if she sees your adoption dropping, identify and personalize upsell and cross sell opportunities, facilitate timely renewals and expansion discussions, and even check in and collect feedback from customers in beta or trial experiences or generally in their product/service journeys. All this sounds amazing. But even more amazing is that she’s an AI. AND, she is driving an average of 24X on ROI in real revenue (closed business), not just pipeline. Again, that is our average across our network!

What strategies would you recommend to sales and marketing leaders looking to fully leverage AI to boost their team’s productivity during slower sales cycles?

Don’t view this as a “slow sales cycle” booster. View this as a way to stay ahead of your competition during bear and bull markets. If you’re growing, grow faster. If you aren’t growing, ignite the growth. If you are growing fast, but not in a capital efficient manner, then leverage this for profitable growth. Strategies involve: a) start with ALL inbound traffic; b) then add all your outbound, then c) apply to the base of existing customers. It’s a 1, 2, 3 strategy, and it works. Also, don’t be afraid of GenAI. There’s a very clear way of repeating the era of “public cloud” vs. “private cloud” in the AI world – namely, instead of putting all your data in the “public GenAI” provider’s hands, let us create a “private GenAI” solution for JUST you. We can guarantee 100% brand safe, 100% AI Act compliant, GDPR compliant, etc.

To Know More, Read Full Interview @ https://ai-techpark.com/aitech-interview-with-jim-kaskade/

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