AI is an enabler that could give small businesses an advantage over bigger businesses says Prospex CEO and co-founder Salvatore Minetti.
The London-based聽start-up has created an聽artificial intelligence solution that helps source relevant sales leads for SMEs.
The Prospex platform uses AI to map out a profile of the seller鈥檚 ideal buyer and the buyer鈥檚 ideal seller and matches the two together.
鈥淎I allows small businesses to undertake complex and normally expensive tasks in a way that until recently would only have been available to large business,鈥� Minetti told 老九品茶Cloud.
鈥淎n SME with some smarts should be able to build some complex solutions and processes and compete in a way that means large businesses are at a disadvantage because smaller business can move and flex and change.
鈥淏ecause of the transformative nature of small businesses they embrace change much better so they are more likely culturally to embrace disruption and transformation in a way large business can鈥檛.
鈥淚f you鈥檙e small and smart and apply some AI to fundamentals you could outcompete the large business on almost every turn.
Minetti came up with the idea having been in sales since leaving school and finding that the single primary challenge is at the top of the sales funnel in lead generation.
鈥淟ogic dictates no lead, no sale,鈥� he said.
鈥淲here鈥檚 tomorrow鈥檚 sale coming from? To this day it鈥檚 the single hardest part of the entire sales process 鈥� where do you get more leads and how do you have some control over the process?
鈥淗ow do you make it a smarter solution beyond just throwing more money, time and resource at it in the hope that one day you鈥檒l get a sale out of it? It鈥檚 something that鈥檚 been with me literally decades.鈥�
Three years after meeting his co-founder Nick at the conference launch of IBM鈥檚 Watson suite the young company has closed two funding rounds and is聽just under聽a month away from going live.
鈥淭he solution could be used by anyone wanting more sales – you could be a partner in a law firm wanting more clients,鈥� he said.
鈥淲e鈥檙e hoping to democratise the sales process because at the moment typically it鈥檚 scaled by throwing more resource at it so small businesses are at a disadvantage. They have to be smarter and more resource effective.鈥�
The platform has a fixed cost per month per user of 10 leads per day at 拢1 a day, which gives each sales person 300 leads a month for 拢30.
鈥淭he traditional methods that require investment in time and energy are all difficult to measure in output and to scale up, so we鈥檙e trying to achieve something far more clear measurable where you invest X and you get Y.
鈥淲e鈥檙e also liberating sales person who normally owns the lead generation process so they can get on with closing the deal.鈥�