Nick Smith built a career in sales and business development, holding leadership roles at companies such as CBS Corp., iHeartRadio and Audacy. His frustrations as a sales exec pushed him to start Kansas City-based Saile Inc., an artificial intelligence startup that arms sales employees with patent-pending and personality-driven sales robots, known as "Sailebots."
"I was a sales person that had to do everything, from concept to cold calling to pitching a deal, writing commercial copy and following up on invoices," he said. "Doing all of these things as a sales person always had me thinking, 'When do sales people actually have time to sell?'"
His sales role had become less exciting because he wanted to be creative every day. The "grunt work" burned him out, he said. Starting Saile was an outlet to merge his career experiences and solve a prevalent problem: the monotony of prospecting.
"Sales people are some of the most dynamic business leaders, and they're undervalued in terms of where they're asked to spend their time," Smith said. "People are being asked to do robot-like tasks, and we're on a mission to save them from that."
Instead of replacing people with robots, Saile's vision is a symbiotic relationship, in which sales execs can focus on what they do best and hand off the tedious tasks to Sailebots.
Saile tailors the personality of its bots to individual sales execs. The bots can automate the research and discovery process of prospective customers, find the right contacts at a company, validate emails, read and react to responses, and schedule meetings, among other tasks. While competitors tackle a small part of the prospecting process, such as providing contact databases, Saile automates the full prospecting life cycle, Smith said.
"We've had success showing this concept of digital labor," he said. "It's the ability to triple your prospecting power with this bot that's performing on your behalf."
Saile has seen it work firsthand. Founded in 2019, the startup now has $1.6 million in recurring revenue and has attracted Fortune 500 clients and global sales teams in 25 countries. Saile accomplished that with only one sales person, who relied on the startup's Sailebots to lessen the load.
The startup recently closed a $1.35 million seed round and is using the money to enhance its platform and build out its sales and engineering team. By March, the headcount will expand from 15 to 28.
