#14 GTM AI Podcast: Empower teams with AI-Powered Workflows with Sriya Maram of Persana AI

https://persana.ai/ Persana AI (you can see a demo of the tech in the GTM AI Tools Demo Library here: https://www.gtmaiacademy.com/course/gtm-ai-tools-demo-library

You can go to Youtube, Apple, Spotify, or here on Linkedin as well as a whole other host of locations to hear the podcast or see the video interview.

Empowering Sales Teams with AI-Driven Workflows: Insights from Sriya Maram ♾️ of Persana AI

In this engaging podcast interview, Coach K sits down with Sriya Maram, the founder of Persana AI , to dive into the world of AI-powered sales enablement. Sriya's passion for AI and her experience as a product manager at LinkedIn have led her to create a platform that aims to give sales teams superpowers through intelligent automation. Throughout the conversation, Sriya provides valuable insights into how AI can be leveraged to enhance sales processes, from lead research and scoring to personalized outbound messaging.

One of the key highlights of the interview is Sriya's emphasis on the importance of human expertise in the AI-driven sales landscape. While AI can automate tedious manual tasks and provide valuable insights, Sriya stresses that the human mind behind the AI is crucial in setting up workflows and understanding the unique needs of buyers. The interview also touches on the concept of capturing buyer intent through AI, which Sriya believes will revolutionize the way sales teams approach their prospects. Overall, the podcast offers an interesting look at the future of sales tech and the role of AI in empowering sales professionals to be more efficient and effective in their roles.

Some key takeaways:

• Persona acts as a "Zapier for sales teams", allowing integration of any AI model (like GPT-4 or Claude) with data sources like CRMs to automate tasks like lead research, scoring and outbound personalization.

• Sriya emphasizes that AI should augment human salespeople, not replace them. As she puts it: "The mind behind the AI, you know, the person setting up these workflows should be you. Like no matter how much, like the AI doesn't know your buyers, the AI doesn't know these workflows that have worked for you for years."

• A major advantage of AI is capturing buyer intent in a more intelligent way by ingesting and learning from fragmented data sources. The future of sales is "understanding truly what is that buyer intent for your product and being able to capture that and act on it."

• Regarding the ideal balance between automation and human interaction, Sriya explains: "Any sort of like manual task, whether it's like, Hey, I want to know what is the pricing of this company that will take a couple of clicks reading through summarizing. That is something an AI should do...The mind behind the AI, you know, the person setting up these workflows should be you."

• When helping clients get started with automation, Persona focuses on their existing processes and data sources. "We don't want to replace your existing workflow," says Sriya. "Where in your existing process, can we bring it all together or make it easier?"

The podcast provides an exciting glimpse into how AI platforms like Persona are empowering sales teams to be more efficient and effective. With the ability to automate manual research tasks and obtain previously hard-to-access buyer intent signals, the future of sales tech looks promising. However, Sriya is quick to emphasize that human expertise and oversight remain critical - AI augments and enables human potential, it doesn't replace it.