Back in 1992, Alec Baldwin helped cement the phrase "Always be closing" as part of the sales vernacular thanks to his performance in the film Glengarry Glen Ross.
Baldwin's character, and the salesmen he tormented, mostly had to rely on their patter and the landline telephone. Sales professionals today have much more sophisticated tools to close deals.
That runs the gamut from work-focused social media platform LinkedIn to the current generation of AI-powered chatbots, which can ingest customer data to help salespeople nurture leads. But the skillsets of chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini are quite broad. Keith Peiris and Henri Liriani, co-founders of the AI-savvy startup Tome, saw an opportunity to create a sales-specific communication tool within this niche.
Peiris and Liriani began their careers at social media giant Meta, where they worked on Instagram and Facebook Messenger, respectively. During their tenure, which spanned from 2011 to 2020, they realized they'd built technology to help people share a lot about themselves -- but sharing work-related content remained a challenge.
"If you want to express a complex idea ... you don't have these really powerful tools like Instagram and TikTok," says Peiris. "You have PowerPoint and Word."
San Francisco-based Tome was founded in 2020 to address this need. Peiris serves as CEO.
They incubated the idea at venture capital firm Greylock Partners with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, built a prototype, launched an AI tool that helps to build presentations and had 20 million users in the first two years.
But some job functions require the use of a presentation tool more than others -- like sales professionals.
"That's when we realized maybe the AI native version of our company wasn't AI presentations, it was actually an assistant who can create presentations, along with all these other things," Peiris says.
They decided to focus on building a sales-specific generative AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Gemini, which salespeople could converse with to prepare for client interactions.
Tome trains its model on companies' sales methodologies and marketing materials, as well as on those of their customer targets. That includes the data they have in customer relationship management platform Salesforce and recordings of sales calls, along with publicly available materials like press releases, earnings reports, SEC filings, analyst reports, LinkedIn posts and podcasts.
This model powers a sales-focused chatbot, which is currently being tested by several Tome clients.
"Imagine ChatGPT for that company, and then you can ask questions, like, 'Tell me more about this initiative,' or, 'Based off of the last earnings call, what pain points does the company have?'" Peiris says.
The Tome assistant will even rank individuals at a target organization based on who it thinks you should call first. After you set up a meeting, the assistant will send you materials to prepare, along with slides for your presentation. If the meeting is recorded, it can be piped back in to further train the model, which will also tell you what it thinks the prospect cares most about and offer suggested next steps based on your conversation.
"You don't have to take notes or anything," Peiris explains. "You can imagine it just being your copilot that's working with you back and forth through the entire process."
He expects the sales assistant to be more broadly available in the next month.
From there, Peiris says he hopes to improve the model's ability to identify target companies and to launch a live coaching product you can use during calls. For example, if a client mentions a competitor, it could step in with details about how your company compares, or if you have a particularly complex product and find yourself a bit tongue-tied, it could pull out the relevant details you should mention.
"We're actually building this to be this real-time assistant, even when you're in calls, so it can help you every step of the way," he says.
He is also interested in developing a tool that will create business proposals.
The company has raised $81 million in funding to date from firms like Greylock, Lightspeed Venture Partner and Coatue.
