Using AI to solve the Last mile problem — Aaron Bollinger // Kronologic

Quotes

• “Marketing and sales organizations have this Last Mile problem which is that, so many of the leads that are created from different marketing channels never convert to actual meetings.” -Aaron“We talked about how to quantify the Last Mile problem and when you look at ways to solve it, we focused on speed the lead. How quickly can we get back to the leads and when we think about designing a technology solution to solve that problem, we take what we call an active scheduling approach.” -Aaron“In Kronologic, active scheduling approach means that when we see that the lead is in the market they are thinking about us and they are open to a conversation. At that point, Kronologic seizes upon that trigger and we reach out on behalf of one of your customer-facing reps at your company and we reach out in the form of a calendar invite, packaged within an email, with a time-proposed based on the real-time availability of the person at your company.” -Aaron“This comes down to a lot of semantics. Marketers, oftentimes, when they hear inbound leads or hand-raisers they are only thinking about demo requests. In reality, hand-raisers come in many forms.” -Aaron“So you are sending a communication that is automated and you are suggesting a time that is based on the availability of the AE/sales rep. To me, there is an interesting dynamic here where I have used calendar links but Kronologic suggests a single time where someone can reach as opposed to having flexibility.” -Ben “If you are like me, you’re selling to a buyer who is exceedingly busy and if you have used calendar links app before, it takes time and it takes work to open up someone else’s calendar, reference yours and go back and forth looking for a time that’s available and taking the initiative to suggestand choose a time frame that you want.” -Aaron“The genesis of Kronologic was at a company that was using Calendly at the time. So we thought, give prospects the most option but when we ran the data what we found is, less than a single percent of all of the pipeline that was created from campaigns werefrom prospects who used those calendar link solutions to go through and schedule the meeting themselves.” -Aaron“Convenience and in-market timing, getting to somebody and making it as simple as possible down to a single click, in the moment that they are thinking about your brand is really what’s most important when it comes to maximizing your lead to meeting conversion rate.” -Aaron“This is where AI comes into it, which is that, if you have Kronologic, your prospect has literally a single click to lock in a meeting. It is the absolute least barrier possible and if that doesn’t work, we absolutely want that to be the best experience possible and we do that using natural language processing (NLP) and AI.” -Aaron“In unexpected cases, our technology will flag that as it requires user intervention and we’ll surface it for the rep, ‘Hey, this one you’ve got to go back in an old-fashioned way and book this on your own but for those 80 -90+ percent of the time, the rep is literally eating lunch or whatever and their calendar is simply booking for them as if they have their own executive admin.” -Aaron“What comes to mind is Google’s AI component where you can use AI to schedule a haircut and Google will respond back to someone. So you are essentially automating the process using technology for the connection between your prospect raising their hand and all they have to do is click once.” -Ben “So we have talked about how to calculate your Last Mile Deficit and how big that TAM can be. What we have seenis, over and over again, companies that use Kronologic to proactively reach out and book the calendar and do it with an instant response, see a 10, 20 up to 30% capture of that total Last-Mile TAM. That could mean hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.” -Aaron“The thing that sticks out to my mind is what your COO, Ben said that the difference between responding in five minutes as opposed to half an hour is like a 21X return in value.” -Ben “Increasingly, the lead streams are coming in automated as well. Two of the popular ones at the moment are PQLs and ABMs. A PQL is a product qualified lead and this is essentially a lead that might be using a premium of your product or some lite version of it, and they’re hitting a level of usage that tells you they are now a top prospect for a paid version of your solution or of your new product.” -Aaron“Kronologic can take that directly from a product if they can be updated in your CRM, we can use that as a cue and reach out directly from that.” -Aaron“ABM (Account-Based Marketing) leads are all about identifying when a prospect is in-market, what are they thinking about, where is their web traffic and usage, and interaction with your brand. If you are like most sales leaders, they don’t want leads andwhat they really want are meetings.” -Aaron“Kronologic integrates into your website so that if you have a demo request or contact us form today, Kronologic is simply plugged into the CRM so that when that request hits, we see it right away and respond automatically.” -Aaron