xant.ai

xant.ai offers a sales acceleration platform, driven by data collected from thousands of interactions, that helps salespeople focus their attention on the deals most likely to close. “We don’t build just applications,” explains Sean Sampson, Lead of Global Sales Enablement. “It’s the artificial intelligence and the data that fuels our applications. A lot of companies offer predictive analytics, but they can’t incorporate the findings into someone’s workflow.”

It comes as no surprise that xant.ai has developed a powerful process for pitching their own product—they own the world’s largest database of sales process information, after all. As sales representatives quantify value for potential customers, they create visualizations in Lucidchart to show where xant.ai will fit in and enhance the prospect’s current workflow. 

Outlining the corporate landscape

Lucidchart comes into play before xant.ai actually begins their sales process. When a qualified lead comes in, the sales team has to identify the people that they’ll target throughout the process. Who are the influencers at the company? Who champions the xant.ai product? With Lucidchart, the team can build account maps, which look similar to org charts, to map out the political landscape and quickly determine whom they are working with. 

Understanding customers

The xant.ai sales team always starts out with a strategic value assessment (SVA). The goal? To identify inefficiencies within the potential client’s current sales process and to show the results InsideSales.com can provide when added to the process. Lucidchart helps the sales team effectively build these SVAs.

Since every company defines value differently, sales representatives first need to deeply understand the prospective customer. With help from an executive sponsor, or a champion of the product, xant.ai learns about the current sales model a company uses, from the time the lead comes in to the time it closes in a sale. Sometimes they even visit the company and observe the process firsthand.

Sean Sampson, who trains and provides the xant.ai sales reps with content to make them more effective, started using Lucidchart to map these processes. It caught on quickly because Lucidchart’s collaborative and visual nature makes it easy to confirm whether the team understands the prospective client’s sales process. The stakes are high to depict the process exactly as it is. If any of the information is portrayed incorrectly by the time it reaches a decision maker, the prospective client loses trust in the salesperson—and xant.ai isn’t likely to close the sale. 

Lucidchart enables xant.ai to get everyone on the same page and nail a prospective client’s process. Sean explains:

“[The executive sponsor] can give us some input and share information back and forth, so we make sure we understand things correctly. And that’s the big advantage of using Lucidchart over other tools to do that mapping.”

Demonstrating value

At this point, the xant.ai sales team completes the strategic value assessment. They start with the client’s current process, mapped out in Lucidchart, and highlight areas of concern. Then the sales representative builds a future state process flow to show what the process would look like with InsideSales.com. These diagrams are added to PowerPoint and combined with a statement of work and key metrics that the platform can improve.

What impact do these diagrams make as part of the whole presentation? Sean weighs in. “If I’m trying to recommend a solution, and I present this process flow to you, especially at an executive level, this tells you that I know your business.”

These process flows show that xant.ai has done its research and is truly an expert in the industry. The diagrams also take complex processes and make them easy to interpret for potential clients who would rather leave the details to InsideSales.com.

“You can have your down-in-the-weeds detail, but if you lead with that, you’ll just lose everybody. . . . Most people that we deal with don’t want to see them. But they need to understand that we understand.”

An SVA, complete with sales process maps, clearly increases interest in the product—the proof is in the numbers. Enterprise sales have a 95% close rate if the sales process includes a strategic value assessment. For xant.ai, visualization through Lucidchart adds the clarity and credibility needed to seal the deal.