Introducing Aircover🚀

Today we’re thrilled to announce our $3M seed round of financing, led by Defy Partners with participation from Firebolt Ventures, Flex Capital, and Ridge Ventures. Our seed round also includes executives across video conferencing, sales, and machine learning. Aircover provides in-meeting, real-time sales tools and insights to help reps win more deals. We’re building a rich custom videoconferencing experience for sales teams to guide them through the entire sales process, from start to finish.

The issue is the difficulty in aligning an entire go-to-market team around the messaging, position, and proper sales process. The idea of more training can only scale so far, and becomes increasingly difficult as a company scales. The feedback loop between sales and leadership was easier to control when I had a 5 person sales team at my first startup, where I was Co-Founder/CEO. As sales and customer success continued to grow to 20, 30, 40 etc, it became increasingly harder to scale the narrative around our product, messaging, and the ecosystem we operated in. Despite our best efforts, if you spoke with 10 different reps, you would get 10 different answers on who we were as a company, how we competed, and the value we brought to market.

When VMware acquired us, the customer facing org turned into thousands of employees. The idea of creating a unified voice around our product and positioning seemed unattainable even though VMware has an extremely sophisticated sales team.  This is an issue facing all large enterprises. 

The problem was, by the time we were able to train the reps on a new competitor, or a recently released feature, the information was already dated. We could never move quick enough to keep up with the pace of change in the market.

At the same time, we had reps coming and going, and with that, sometimes years of tribal knowledge walking out the door.

Meeting recordings, although valuable, can also only scale so far. If a rep has 5 meetings a day, each 30 minutes, that's 2.5 hours per rep per day or 12.5 hours per week of meetings. Multiply that by 1,000 customer facing roles, and we have 12,500 hours of meeting recordings PER WEEK. A call recording is a measurement of the past. The game is already over. The Atlanta Falcons can rewatch Super Bowl 51 as many times as they want, but they blew that 25 point lead, and that outcome will never change. Our goal is to help all customer-facing teams change the outcome of the game. 

Trending ahead

When I look at the trends driving the Future of Work, and how that dictates our primary forms of communication with employees and customers, tools like Slack, Teams, and Zoom emerge.

What these platforms have done is create a reliable way to communicate and conduct business in a virtual world.

While there are many companies that are building out apps on top of Slack and Teams, virtual meetings have largely focused on stability and ease of use, with an unchanged interface.

If you're a musician, yoga instructor, or an enterprise B2B seller, your Zoom experience is the same.

The adoption of videoconferencing for customer meetings, especially by large inside sales teams, was already a strategy employed by organizations. With the rise of remote work, this trend is only accelerating. The days of flying halfway across a country for a single customer meeting are over; in the future this becomes the exception vs the rule. What will separate organizations in this new model, is their ability to leverage technologies to drive sales effectiveness and sales efficiency within their revenue teams.

Aircover is born

This had us asking:

• What if we could update the field on new information in real-time, and have those insights surfaced immediately in their customer meetings? 
• What if we could provide tools to help sellers create a better buyer experience? 
• What if we could use customer conversations to take a data driven approach to sales enablement?
  

We built Aircover to help revenue teams scale their go-to-market strategy. By integrating with conferencing software, we provide the seller with in-meeting insights and tools to help them have more effective customer conversations. Aircover automates parts of the sales process, and integrates with your CRM in order to save time on non-selling activities. Our initial product is the Aircover App for Zoom Meetings. Sales reps and other members of your customer-facing teams can join your regular Zoom calls with the Aircover App. We’ve been collaborating closely with Zoom and they have been fantastic to work with:

One of the goals of launching the Zoom SDK was to provide developers with the tools they need to create valuable and engaging experiences for our mutual customers and integrations ecosystem. Aircover’s focus on building sales intelligence directly into the meeting, to guide customer-facing teams through the entire sales cycle, is the type of innovation we had envisioned when we set out to create a broader platform," said Brendan Ittelson, CTO, at Zoom.

Through natural language processing, we’re able to harness the key parts of the conversation to fundamentally change sales enablement through a much more data driven approach. It’s time to meet employees in-the-moment to help them drive value in all of their customer conversations. Because we are in-meeting, Aircover can update the field instantly on new messaging and positioning, and influence the outcome of that call.

For those of you who are excited about our mission to help more effectively scale go-to-market teams, get in touch, as we’d love to chat with you. And if you’re interested in giving Aircover a try, sign-up for the beta at Aircover.ai. 

- Andrew
Co-Founder / CEO
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Read more on TechCrunch
‍https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/17/defy-partners-leads-3m-round-into-sales-intelligence-platform-aircover/

Press Release
‍https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/aircover-raises-3m-seed-funding-led-by-defy-partners-301379693.html

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