Where AI takes vizrm
We're adding AI to vizrm without a chat box. Here's how we're using it to turn the contacts already in your CRM into an org chart, show you where your coverage is thin, and find the stakeholders you're missing.
We've had plenty of AI ideas thrown at us, from customers, friends and our own team, and I am glad we have thrown away many of them. I don't believe in bolting a chat interface onto a product and calling that an AI strategy. The VIZ in vizrm stands for visual - text is a step back in my opinion.
Opening an account in vizrm with 100+ contacts, however, takes some considerable time of dragging and dropping to define a proper account map. If AI helps us make this a single button click, this is the first thing I want to build.
The two questions vizrm exists to answer
There are two fundamental questions vizrm tries to answer for any B2B seller:
- Who are the people I talk to
- Who are the people I should be talking to in order to influence and win the deal
Every feature we build is in service of one of those two questions. So every AI feature has to answer one of them better or faster.
Faster: from a blank canvas to a first draft
With AI, vizrm now reads every contact's job title when an org chart loads and works out two things from it: roughly how senior that person is, and which function they sit in. And AI is a good tool to do this, because job titles are messy: inconsistent between companies, abbreviated and in many, many languages.
And still they provide enough signal to make a sensible first guess, so vizrm can propose a structure. Some improvements will span around:
- The contact list ordered by seniority and grouped by department, rather than alphabetically
- Reporting lines suggested for contacts, so you're only confirming a contact's reportees
- Groups created and filled automatically from the departments we detect
- A first draft of an entire chart for an account nobody has mapped yet
The same logic applies in the browser extension. When you're on a LinkedIn profile, vizrm can tell you where that person most likely fits into the org chart and who they probably report to.
Better: seeing what's missing
Once seniority and department are attached to every contact, we can also use this to analyze and improve:
- Department and seniority in custom views, and as heat maps on the chart, so you can see at a glance whether an account is cleanly structured or just a pile of contacts with no hierarchy
- A read on the seniority spread of the people attached to a deal
- A score for how well the people on an account or a deal match the roles you actually need to win
But we can take this a step further: describe the roles you need on your side to win a deal, building on the Buying Roles you already assign in vizrm today, and then get two things back:
- A list of contacts already in your CRM who fit each role and aren't on the chart yet
- The same evaluation inside LinkedIn while you're searching, so you know whether the person on screen is worth adding before you add them
That's the "who should you be talking to" question, answered with data you already own and a definition of winning that came from your own deals rather than from us.
Where we are with development
The custom views, heat maps, deal filters and Buying Roles described above exist today. The classification that makes them smarter is what we have shipped now.
While the AI is crunching the data and we continue to improve the classification algorithm, we will ship the first features in the UI:
Improved Contact list, Assisted Chart Building, and adding this data to views will be first.
What is next? You tell us. Which of these would actually change your week? I'd rather build the two that matter to you than all six in the order we happened to think of them. Reply and tell me, or bring it up the next time we talk.
Markus