Dive Brief:
- Sandler Partners launched an AI sales engineer that channel partners can use to vet vendors and products at its annual summit Tuesday in San Diego.
- Independent agents that work with the technology services distributor can email a virtual engineer called ScoutAI and receive responses in minutes. ScoutAI draws from a data pool of digital correspondences between the company’s partners and human sales engineers, weighted by recency.
- “We've got the information of how any of our engineers would actually answer a question sent to them, on steroids,” Sandler Partners Founder and Managing Director Alan Sandler told Channel Dive. “If you got them all together in a room and they were arguing back and forth with each other, we've got how they would answer.”
Dive Insight:
Executives assured partners that ScoutAI will not replace human engineers. In fact, the TSD recently hired its sixth sales engineer.
“We are in no way using this as a cost reduction tool,” Sandler Partners President Adam Press said. “This is really to allow our engineers to be able to spend more quality time with our partners and their customers.”
TSDs typically offer free sales engineer services to their agent partners. Most technology advisor firms lack the funds to hire sales engineers, who draw salaries upwards of $250,000 annually, North Atlantic Consultants President Michael Agri said. Sales engineers provide vendor shortlists to agents based on customer requirements and join agents on client calls to answer technical questions. Sandler Partners wants to use AI to free up time for those calls.
“The most important thing is for them to have the time to be on the phone with the customer of our agent,” Sandler said.
While Sandler Partners' six engineers support more than a thousand registered partners, they aren't overworked. The company is hoping ScoutAI will increase their usage.
“We actually have a lot of agents that say, 'I was scared to call the engineer,' or 'I was embarrassed because I didn't know anything on the subject,' or, 'I've already asked the engineer before and I don't remember what they said, so I don't want to bother them again,'” he said.
ScoutAI takes the pressure off, Sandler said. Partners can email the tool at any time without fear of inconveniencing someone.
“There's no dumb questions,” he said.
The engineers are also using ScoutAI for their own edification.
“There's just so much out there, and there's so many different providers in our portfolio now that to know everything is next to impossible,” Sandler said.
Agri tested ScoutAI by asking it a question he knew the answer to.
“It was extraordinarily accurate and actually added additional insights that I didn't even think of,” he said.
Agri used the tool to develop a vendor shortlist for a wireless deal. He said the answers reminded him of what Andrew Rustad, Sandler Partner’s director of sales engineering for eastern U.S., Canada and Latin America would say.
Agri regularly taps Rustad for customer calls. Sales engineers act as a member of the TA’s own team and enhance its technical credibility.
“Technology advisors for the most part are quarterbacks,” Agri said. “We're connectors of people. We connect our clients with really smart sales engineers and providers that bring solutions. In many cases, our job is to just sit there, shut up, enjoy our coffee and look like a hero, and the sales engineers enable us to do that.”
