Hi @hannah_chaplin and thanks for your support!
To begin with, we're building Ricochet to aggregate the sort of data we know the majority of businesses want when researching and qualifying their customers. We're paying close attention to feedback and analytics, and we're hoping to see some signal as to how we can better enrich the data we offer, and also whether there's a need for more specialist sources for specific industries.
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It's been great to watch this develop and it's awesome to see it on Product Hunt! How much more of the process can you automate?
Hey @fenbielding - we think we can automate a reasonable amount; we can definitely start to automate elements of qualification quite quickly, and we've done some initial work to consider how aspects of lead generation can be tackled. It's a huge challenge because of the subjective nature of how salespeople consider leads and qualifying criteria, but it can definitely be improved from the current status quo.
@paul_a_smith great job, Ricochet looks very helpful for prospecting and gathering information quickly. You say that the future of sales is full-funnel automation. Is this the first feature of Ricochet and we can look forward to more features to take the information gathered to the next step in the sales process?
@scott_wylie1 Hey Scott, thanks for the kind comments and a great question!
So when you look at most of the sales funnel, it's process-led, there's objective best practise, outcomes can be measured and effectively managed. And being process-led means that it's possible to introduce automation at scale.
But TOFU activity like lead generation and sales prospecting, is really hard to automate:
- There's no one right way to do lead generation
- Customer profiles are subjective, often determined by instinct or hunch
- Business information is highly fragmented, missing and siloed
The result is a lot of manual, repetitive activity, punching search after search into databases like Sales Navigator, and so on.
With the ML and NLP models we've started developing over the past year, we think there's a better way to do this, and start automating this activity. But it starts with data - sales prospecting needs good information, so that's where we're focussing in the short-term. In the mid-term, we see Ricochet effortlessly integrating into CRMs like Hubspot and Piepdrive, and sales engagement software like Outreach and Salesloft.
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Hey Paul! Great idea, I would love to know if you have plans to build in being able to get details of specific roles e.g. wanting to know the Head of Marketing at each company?
Hey @nafisa_bakkar1 - that's a good question.
The tl;dr is short-term there are no plans just yet, longer term that might be.
The world of people data - emails, names, roles - is really hard to do really well. A lot of tools claiming to do it are just scraping LinkedIn all day long, guessing email addresses etc. We didn't want to be that sort of company.
We started looking at what we could do in beta, but from the user feedback, it was clear that unless we got very good, very quickly, we'd always look like we were doing a bad job, even though the truth is it's incredibly difficult and needs far more resource than we currently effort.
Since there are plenty of other services and extensions that do people information well, we decided to park it for now. We may return to it, though - it's an interesting problem worth solving.
Looks great - is there an API we could access? love to pull in some of your domain data if we were able to pass you a domain. That would allow us to enhance our existing database of organisations and companies.
@paul_a_smith
@connorpm Hey Connor, great to hear from you - we've discussed building an API but it's not on the roadmap in the short-term. If it's something that'd be useful for you and the Bridge team, we can certainly look into it!
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Hey Paul & Team. Is Ricochet sector specific or works across all verticals? Such a time saving idea, fantastic.
Hi @ian_browne, thanks for the comment.
To begin with, we're building Ricochet to aggregate the sort of data we know the majority of businesses want when researching and qualifying their customers, so it should have value in most settings.
That said, we're paying close attention to feedback and analytics, and we're hoping to see some signal with regards to how we can better enrich the data we offer, and also whether there's a need for more specialist sources for specific industries.
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Hey Paul, tried RIcochet today. It's easy to use and to an extent it does club data from multiple websites onto one page which is nice, but I tried it for a bunch of companies including the one I work for - and it either returned stale info or none at all. Just wanted to know if this is because you're still not focussing on Indian customers?
@junius_dsilva1 Hi Junius, thank you for trying Ricochet!. This is our MVP, we've started with the UK and USA, and the Data sources for business based in those territories. As time go on we'll be increasing those to match demand wherever we can.
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@joyork Hey Jo, sounds great! Looking forward to that :) All the best!!
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