Startup embraces ‘digital labor’, creating personalized robots for tedious tasks — beginning with cold calls

Salespeople spend too much time searching for emails, making cold calls and setting up meetings — leaving less energy for comprehensive conversations and closing deals, said Nick Smith.

His solution: robots for salespeople or, as he calls them, “Sailebots.” 

“One day I had a revelation that there could be a tool for these mundane tasks. What if every high-level salesperson could have their own, personalized sales robot? How much more could we accomplish with all the time given back?” proposed Smith, who co-founded Saile alongside Clive Cadogan in July 2018 and now serves as the company’s CEO. 

Saile uses personality-driven AI technology and curated data to generate actionable revenue opportunities, as well as read and react to text, Smith explained. 

“There’s a lot of sales enablement solutions out there, but I would argue that most salespeople don’t love them,” he said. “We want to be a sales enablement solution that salespeople love. Because of my background in sales, I feel like I have a pretty good pulse on the different personalities of salespeople — and we’re making personality-driven robots for them.”

Each Sailebot is specifically built based on the personality of the salesperson, allowing the client to set the rules, Smith said. Sailebots take about two weeks to build, but the Saile team is working through standardization tasks that would allow for quicker development, he added. 

The Saile team consists of 15 human employees and is quickly approaching 200 Sailebots in 23 countries, Smith said, noting that Sailebots can be programmed to various languages. Sailebots have been adapted by major companies such as Spectrum, Jergens, Audacy and others across the Fortune 500. 

On Thursday, Saile announced its new product, Skipper — which will allow every salesperson to onboard, build and deploy their own sales robot. Skipper is powered by digital labor (which measures how many human-worthy prospecting tasks the Sailebot performs on behalf of the human) to automate the entire prospecting lifecycle and generate actionable opportunities.

“The Skipper product is an accessible and affordable product for any independent sales [representative] and will propel Saile as a pioneer in the web3 for sales space,” Smith said. 

Click here to check out Saile technology.

Saile team members at Plexpod Flashcube

Saile team members at Plexpod Flashcube

Salesperson-turned-tech entrepreneur

As someone who worked in New York City as a salesperson for the majority of his career, Smith has leaned heavily on that experience, he shared.

“On my most stressful days — or on days where I feel like I’m dealing with the most unknown — I go back to basics,” Smith said. “I had no experience with fundraising. I didn’t have any coding experience. I didn’t have any tech experience as a founder. But I had a lot of experience creating solutions, talking to clients and closing deals; so that’s just what I did. It’s how Saile was born and how we got here today.” 

Smith started Saile with $80 — an amount he considers “a bit too conservative at times,” but he was able to quickly secure his first client through utilizing Saile’s own technology, he said.

“We started with one robot working for us, and it delivered us our first client, and our next robot was the robot working for them,” Smith recalled. “Looking back today, it’s like this family tree of sales robots that have generated all these revenue opportunities.” 

Saile has never sold a concept, Smith continued, rather the company is selling results.

“No one was paying us to try,” Smith said. “They’re paying us for digital labor, for actionable opportunities from the Sailebot. They’re paying us based on a form of guaranteed metric.”

In 2021, the Sailebots performed 13 million digital labor prospecting tasks and saved companies an average of $1.16 on every task compared to $1.47 per human task, Smith noted. On average, a Sailebot can replace the work of three manual sales development representatives, he added.

Saile

Digital tools in the pandemic 

Rather than a learning curve to the technology, the biggest hurdle is salespeople learning to share the playing field with their own tool, Smith said. 

“Salespeople are used to learning how to play nice with a new colleague, or learning how to compete with an account inside their organization, but now they have this tool that can accomplish so many of their daily tasks,” Smith explained. “We can shift their priorities and allow them to have more high IQ conversations.” 

The COVID-19 pandemic had a beneficial impact on Saile in the regard that people were much more open to a digital sales solution that would automate their prospecting process than they were in years prior, Smith revealed. 

“It really gave us a nice launch pad because digital tools wedge their way into the daily work process,” Smith said. “[Sailebots are] less of an objection now because people can picture how tools like Zoom are helping them day-to-day.”

Every sales associate deserves to have a Sailebot working for them, Smith added.

“On the innovation front, we’ve been working hard to make that a possibility,” Smith said. “We are committed to making this tool affordable for any sales executive to have, regardless of experience. … We’ve got some really exciting news coming in July, around our birthday, so we’re looking forward to sharing that with everyone.”