In 1992, Alec Baldwin popularized the phrase “always think about closing” into sales vocabulary with his performance in the film Glengarry Glen Ross.
Baldwin’s character, and the salesmen he tormented, had to rely primarily on wordplay and landlines, and today’s sales professionals have far more sophisticated tools for closing deals.
That ranges from work-focused social media platform LinkedIn to today’s AI-powered chatbots that can pull in customer data to help salespeople nurture leads. But the skill sets of chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are so broad. AI-savvy startup Tome co-founders Keith Peiris and Henri Liriani saw an opportunity in this niche to create a sales-focused communications tool.
Instagram for ideas
Peiris and Liliani began their careers at social media giant Meta, where they helped develop Instagram and Facebook Messenger, respectively. During their tenure there, which ran from 2011 to 2020, the pair built technology that helped people share more about themselves, but they found that sharing work-related content remained a challenge.
“If you want to express complex ideas, you don’t have a powerful tool like Instagram or TikTok,” Peiris says. “You have PowerPoint and Word.”
San Francisco-based Tome was founded in 2020 to address this need, with Peiris serving as CEO.
They incubated the idea with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman at venture capital firm Greylock Partners, built a prototype, launched an AI tool to help people create presentations, and gained 20 million users in the first two years.
However, some roles, such as salespeople, require the use of presentation tools more than others.
“That’s when we realized that our company’s version of AI native might not be an AI presentation, but actually an assistant that can create presentations and other functions,” Peiris says.
They decided to focus on building sales-specific generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini that salespeople can converse with in preparation for customer interactions.
Tome trains its models on a company’s sales and marketing materials and customer targeting materials, including data stored in customer relationship management platform Salesforce, recordings of sales calls, and publicly available materials such as press releases, earnings reports, SEC filings, analyst reports, LinkedIn posts and podcasts.
This model is being used for a sales-focused chatbot that is currently being tested by several Tome clients.
“Imagine introducing ChatGPT to that company, and then you can ask questions like, ‘Tell me more about this initiative,’ or ‘According to your last earnings call, what are the pain points the company is facing?'” Peiris says.
The Tome Assistant will rank who should be called first. When you set up a meeting, the Assistant will send you any materials to prepare along with slides for your presentation. If the meeting is recorded, you can pipe it back in to further train the model. This will help it understand what your prospects are most likely to be interested in and suggest next steps based on the conversation.
“You don’t even need to take notes,” Peiris explains, “just imagine having a co-pilot communicating with you throughout the entire process.”
He expects the sales assistant to be more widely available next month.
From there, Peries hopes to improve the model’s ability to identify target companies and launch a live coaching product that can be used during calls. For example, if a customer mentions a competitor, the model can step in and provide details on how they compare to the company. Or, if they have a very complex product and are stumped, the model can pull out relevant details to mention.
“We’re building this as a real-time assistant that can help you in any situation, even while on a call,” he says.
He is also interested in developing tools for creating business proposals.
The company has raised $81 million to date from firms including Greylock, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Coatue.
This is one in a series of short profiles on AI startups to help you understand the current state of the ongoing artificial intelligence activity. For more information on AI, check out our new AI Atlas hub, which features product reviews, news, tips, explainers, and more.
