Relatas Is Like Google Now For Sales People

Relatas is another startup looking to raise funds to bring their brainwave to more people in the world. Imagine a smart office assistant platform that will give you all the reminders and data you need. Relatas requires no data entry and no change in user behaviour. Founder of Relatas, Sudip Dutta talks to us.

What’s the Relatas business model and tell us how you got started with Relatas.

Relatas is my life story.

I spent over 17 years selling across 4 different continents. I also built the CRM system for a multi-billion dollar company. Based on my product development and personal sales experience I understood the problems that the existing CRM systems were not solving and thus went ahead and built it out myself. When Mark Zuckerberg wanted artificial intelligence (AI) outfitted for his home, he wrote it himself. It's what you do when you want something so bad.

Relatas is Sales AI that helps professionals maintain relationships and sell better. With an amazing set of advisors including former COO Salesforce, former senior director Oracle and former vice president of sales at Infosys we form a formidable team.

Your network is large and there isn't enough time. How do you nurture all the relationships with actual human contact? Merely having contacts in a database, or connecting on LinkedIn is not enough. Without nurture, people lose touch, forget to follow-up and don't remember much from the previous meeting. Business opportunities and time, both suffer.

Imagine Relatas as Google Now for professional relationships. Using AI and seamless connectivity with your phone, email and CRM, Relatas takes charge to keep you on top of your network. You get a more responsive professional network, faster revenue growth and the satisfaction of keeping your professional relationships close. Relatas also helps managers, VPs, chief executive officers (CXOs) see real time data of which sales team members are interacting with whom and which accounts need immediate attention.

Relatas’ users get intelligent insights with no data entry required from the user and with no change in user behavior.

What’s unique about Relatas? How are you different from the existing competitors?

Relatas’ USP is getting insights based on no data entry and no change in behavior for the user. The user gets best path to success, automate most repetitive tasks with Relatas. Relatas is Sales AI to help busy sales professionals to stay on top of their contacts and pipeline. Using machine learning (ML) and deep learning, Relatas help the sales professionals get through their activities in lot less time. Intelligence is provided to the users with actionable insights for them to take action to build better relationships and close deals faster.

Relatas stays on top of your interactions to tell you who you are losing touch with and gives you insights to re-connect back. If you are traveling to San Francisco next week, Relatas can tell you who else to re-connect with while you are there to maximize your time. Relatas tells you every morning which important mails you need to respond to, Relatas reminds you to follow up on your yesterday’s meetings - all these come with Relatas AI building the mail for you so that you don’t have to put the effort to type or personalize each individual mail.

Insights like who you connected with and when, what was your mode of communication (mail/ call/ SMS/ meeting/ Social) who are the common connections, who can connect your next prospect, etc. CXO and Sales managers can get real-time view of what’s happening with their sales reps and companies which need immediate attention.

CRM is a crowded space, but Relatas has created a niche for itself by pioneering AI for sales professionals.

What is the funding status?

We were part of Startup Chile where we got some funds. We are currently looking to raise a round.

What challenges are you facing in running your business?

This is my second startup and as with any startup there are various challenges across various stages of the company; like hiring, funding, revenue, etc. That’s the fun and excitement of being in a startup.

How has been the people`s response been so far?

I look at people’s response as both internal and external.

Internal is our team and people looking to work with us and external being our customer and investors. Overall the response have been excellent. We have so many people looking to work with us, it’s a humbling experience. Our AngelList profile helps us get many exciting profiles looking to work with us and its really humbling to see that.

After we won the runner-up award at Google Launchpad and Startup Chile, the customer traction has improved a lot. Earlier we had to reach out to companies to try us out, now we have companies reaching out to us to help with their Sales teams. So I would say people’s love and response has kept us moving forward.

Currently we are doing over 3 million daily interaction analysis, have a network graph of 1.5 million people, users from over 700 companies representing over 300 global cities.

How do you look at expansion?

Expansion is part of growth. We are seeing traction from various geographies and we are looking to get the right funding to expand.

What has been the biggest learning so far?

I guess after 6 years of being an entrepreneur, I’m still learning. Even after spending 17 years in sales, I’m still learning. The biggest learning so far has come from my family and my team comprising the development team, advisory team and the customers: the learning is to work hard, but play harder.

What is the market size and opportunity?

CRM and analytics industry is going to be worth over 80 billion dollars by 2018. AI based CRM will be a 20 billion dollar industry. That is the market we are playing in.