Today we’d like to introduce you to Adam Honig.
Adam, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Before I started Spiro, I had started another company called Innoveer, also based in Boston. Over time, we grew this business to be one of the largest “CRM” consulting firms world-wide.
“CRM” stands for ‘customer relationship management’ and is software that salespeople use to track their customers and prospects, manage the deals they’re selling and gives companies visibility into their future business.
After 15 years of Innoveer, we had 1,000s of customers including Bose, New York Life, Staples and had worked with close to 1M salespeople on this CRM software. I sold the company in 2012.
The primary thing that we learned by working with all of these clients is that their salespeople hated the existing solutions.
These companies would pay millions of dollars and their sales teams would basically refuse to use the software.
After I sold the business, I happened to see a movie that would change my life. It’s called Her and it’s about a man (played by Joaquin Phoenix) who downloads an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant on his phone (played by the voice of Scarlett Johansson).
I was seized by the notion that we could use AI to solve the needs of these salespeople that had struggled and hated these CRM products.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
To fulfill our mission — bring AI to improve the lives of sales teams — we need to have over 15,000 individual salespeople try our product and have it learn from them. We achieved this, but getting that many people to help us with the product was a major undertaking.
We also needed to raise a significant amount of money just to build our product — $5M so far and counting — because so much of the AI technology that we’re using has never been done before. Finding investors who understood the problems our customers were facing and believing in us was a real challenge! I think we had 80 ‘no’s before the first ‘yes’.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Spiro – what should we know?
Spiro is the maker of an artificial intelligence powered CRM. Basically it is software that is designed to help salespeople be more effective, speak to more prospects during the week and automate boring repetitive tasks so they can focus on selling. Plus, it gives sales leadership great insight into the progress of the team, the sales pipeline and essentially the future of the business.
After four years and over 130 customers, I’m very proud that we receive feedback from our customers all the time about how Spiro is helping them improve their sales. One customer just let us know that because of Spiro his team has already beat their annual quota — in June!
I’m also really proud of our team here in Boston. What we’re trying to do is hard, and they are super committed to both our business and our customers. And they’re just great people to be with.
Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
I didn’t start the business by myself. I have two amazing partners in Andy Levi — our CTO — and Justin Kao — our VP, Growth. Andy and Justin both worked with me at my last company and not only do they have tremendous experience in CRM but they have a ‘can do attitude’ that helps us break through any obstacles in our way.
There have been many people who have been super helpful along the way. Rob Wadsworth from HarbourVest Partners who personally lead the first financing round. Tom Tucker a technology executive who has been on our board and helped oversee our finances. Chris Lochhead, a legendary marketing guru, who provides continual insight and inspiration to the team. Jennifer Jordan for really ‘getting it’ and helping us with raising additional capital.
It is a long list of people who helped and are helping, and we’re grateful to all of them.
Contact Info:
- Address: Spiro Technologies, Inc
334 Boylston Street,
Boston, MA 02116 - Website: https://spiro.ai
- Email: adam@spiro.ai
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SpiroHQ/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/spirohq
- Other: https://spiro.ai/careers/
Image Credit:
Alex Vainstein
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