Yesterday, Tomasz Tunguz posted this image on Twitter. Typing “Compare Salesforce & Hubspot for a 10-person sales team. Which is better?” into Gemini produces this result:

Why is this important? Because there has been a big shift in how enterprise buyers buy, and how sellers need to sell.

The role of sales has moved downstream. Buyers are better informed. Their research starts online, with websites, analyst reports, customer reviews, and now LLMs. In many cases, they also try or use the product (thanks to product-led-everything). Prospects are engaging sales reps later in the buying cycle.

Sales has become more technical. The above means that prospects engage sales for more advanced information or support. More than the educational 101 stuff is needed, and customers are looking to solve their edge cases, or specific workflows & integrations. Or they’re looking for other specifics like legal, infosec, data privacy, data residency, and retention policies. And to top it off, products have also become more complex. Every product is a tech product (I’m looking at you, Tesla), and soon every product will be an AI product.

Pressure on sales reps is higher than ever. With the post-COVID focus on efficiency, sales teams are expected to do more: higher quotas, less staff, and a tougher market where buying decisions are going through more scrutiny than ever. And ask any sales engineer, they are always overworked with ratios between sales:SE hovering from 1:3 to 1:5.

Roles are converging, and the modern sales rep has to be good at relationships, and technology, and be super-productive, all at the same time. We believe AI can manage product knowledge so that sales can go back to what they know best - manage relationships, navigate the enterprise, and get the win. Sales and pre-sales teams lack the right tooling to handle this new selling environment.

And that’s the vision with which we partnered with Manisha to build SiftHub. We’ve known Manisha for several years and always admired her unique combination of customer empathy, technical skills, and entrepreneurial instinct. Having seen the world of technical sales during her days at IBM Watson and while building LogiNext, she empathized deeply with the problem statement. We were instantly intrigued by the possibilities of changing the world of technical sales with AI.

I’m personally excited to lead the seed round in SiftHub and partner with Manisha and our co-investors and angels including Sanjay Nath (Blume), Siddharth (Neon), Harshil & Shashank (Razorpay), Arvind (Superops), Manish (exCloudflare), Andrew (Superhuman), and several others. If you’re interested in roles at Sifthub, we’re hiring for engineering, design, and GTM so reach out to Manisha on Linkedin!

PS: At Matrix Partners India, we’ve always been excited by applied AI - the intersection of AI and business applications. We’ve backed companies like Murf AI, Atomicwork, Aampe, and more in stealth (more on this soon!) and would love to hear from you if you’re reinventing large markets with AI-first applications. Write to Ashwin, Madhav, or me on Linkedin or by email.