Virtual Assistant Creator, Ciara, Launched An Innovative Tool To Help Sales Reps Close More Deals

Ciara, the first virtual assistant for inside sales representatives, has had a busy few months since its official launch on May 2019. First, it closed a successful seven-digit seed funding round with lead investors being UVC Partners, a venture capital firm backing entrepreneurs working on industrial technologies, enterprise software and mobility. Then in the process, Ciara garnered hundreds of users on its platform from across a slew of industries that are all looking to sell smarter and faster. Most recently, it announced its roll out to the United States market where it opened up an office in California to take advantage and interact with the vibrant startup and investment community. In addition, one of its target markets is Los Angeles due to the fast-growing startup and tech scene. It plans to connect with LA SaaS teams as part of its roll-out strategy.

Ciara co-founders are Konstantin Krauss and Martin Heibel, both veteran technology entrepreneurs. They met by chance in 2018 at a startup event in Munich, Germany. They clicked instantly and learned they were both ready to take on a new project. After bouncing ideas around and brainstorming industry focus, they landed on creating the best and brightest virtual assistant for the inside sales industry.

“During the brainstorming process, we really honed in on the idea of a virtual assistant for B2B sales,” said Krauss. “Everyone has heard of digital assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Home. You’ll find them in multiple households worldwide and they are gaining more and more popularity every day. It only makes sense that virtual assistants will soon dominate offices. We recognized that trend and need for business and created Ciara with the goal to make daily work life easier and more productive.”

The proof is in the numbers in terms of why Krauss and Heibel landed on targeting the sales market:

On average, sales professionals spend just 34% of their time selling.* A virtual assistant can help to improve productivity enabling reps to spend more time actually selling.
On average, 60% of sales reps have reported an increase in virtual meetings since 2015*. The need for a dedicated virtual assistant for inside sales reps is long overdue.
Artificial Intelligence is the top growth area for sales teams — its adoption is forecasted to grow 139% over the next three years.* Ciara will hit this need head-on by launching AI voice recognition and smart sales guidance.

“For us, it’s not about building artificial intelligence that replaces workers,” said Heibel “We didn’t build Ciara to take away anyone’s job. We want to use the technology that already exists to make the jobs of millions of workers a lot easier. With Ciara, we’ll simplify onboarding and make work processes more efficient. It is evident technology helps people more and more every day to be more productive. We are convinced that the next jump in this dimension will be digital assistants in the workplace.”

Ciara’sinside sales assistant core features include:

Easy guidelines: Clearly defined playbooks provide sales reps with question and answer suggestion. For example, if a sales rep receives a response such as “I have to run this buying decision up the food chain” the playbook has an answer ready.
Real-time support: The assistant offers actionable advice on calls to ensure the best sales outcomes possible. In the near future, Ciara will become even smarter with voice recognition.
Smooth interaction: Allows users to take notes in the assistant while on a sales call, sync the data and integrate with a CRM such as Salesforce, HubSpot or Pipedrive.
Deep learning: The more Ciara is used, the better it learns and is able to provide feedback to improve sales tasks and actions.

Ciara is currently available completely free of charge. With Ciara’s goal being to develop an easy-to-use assistant and build the best possible product, it believed offering the product for free for now is the right thing to do. The founders went on to state, “In order to achieve our goal, we need feedback from our customers. We think it’s a fair deal for our first customers to trade free usage of the Ciara assistant for valuable feedback.”

Sign up and start using Ciara for free at GetCiara.com. Set-up takes no more than two minutes and users will be off and selling better in no time.

About Ciara:

Ciara is a virtual assistant for inside sales professionals and teams. Sales agents can create custom and interactive sales guides, manage playbooks, and structure their sales phone calls. The objection handling feature helps sales agents answer difficult customer questions, e.g. on competition, pricing, and new product capabilities. Standard integrations to the leading CRM systems – such as Salesforce, Hubspot and others – make it easy to store customer information gained in Ciara-led phone conversations centrally. Ciara already supports more than a hundred companies worldwide in building a consistent and efficient inside sales process and to train new employees quickly. Sign up and start using Ciara for free at GetCiara.com

*Source: Salesforce

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