5 GenAI tools deliver GTM efficiency for TheLoops

“Being an AI company that’s focused on CX, we know that AI can deliver productivity gains across teams,” shared TheLoops CEO, Somya Kapoor. With that in mind, Kapoor and Head of Marketing Jaclyn Mullen set out to evaluate and adopt a set of AI and Generative AI (GenAI) tools that could significantly increase the velocity of their sales/marketing/product feedback cycle.

AI is top of mind for business leaders, with 64% of companies believing AI-driven technologies will increase worker productivity (2024 Forbes Advisor survey), and nearly half are already using AI in some capacity in areas such as cybersecurity, fraud management, and content production. In marketing and selling TheLoops, an intelligence platform using GenAI and predictive analytics to provide insights to customer experience teams, Kapoor and Mullen were convinced they could find efficiencies in their own go-to-market process. We talked with them about tool evaluation, what they chose and why, discussed what’s still missing, and got an optimistic, forward-looking view.

TheLoops team incorporates AI-driven tools throughout the sales/product feedback cycle with Fathom, Notion, Descript, and snazzyDocs.

Optimizing Sales Calls with Fathom

“You can learn a lot from customer calls. It’s real-time qualitative feedback. But the reality is, we can’t have product, marketing, sales, and the CEO all on the call even if we would all benefit from it,” said Mullen. The first order of business was to evaluate note taking and summarization apps. Fathom came out on top. The platform transcribes and summarizes calls and can create highlight reels from across calls based on key phrases about pain points, competitors, timelines for decision-making, or reactions to pricing/offers.

Customer call summaries aren’t new. Business Development Representatives (BDRs) or entry-level sales folks would spend hours summarizing calls at the end of every day. Now, Fathom does it in minutes. It’s also fully integrated with HubSpot,TheLoops’ CRM, and it automatically updates the prospect’s profile with the summary and assigns tasks. “At the end of every day, I spend 10 minutes going through the Fathom summaries. It gives me a strong sense of people’s current tech stacks, their pain points, and what their open questions are,” said Kapoor. “It’s like having a superpower.”

Quick Turn Marketing with Notion and Descript

TheLoops uses Notion across the company for project management and collaboration. Last year, the platform introduced AI writing features. “We didn’t have to spend a lot of time looking at AI writing assistants before we realized we had what we needed already with Notion,” shared Mullen. “As a marketer, I can already spot AI-generated content from a mile away. Whatever Notion’s product and engineering teams are doing, the copy they produce for us reads more natural than what we were getting from other AI integrations.”

Mullen and Kapoor emphasize that even with how good Notion is, they rarely if ever take the first version of copy generated. Much effort is spent iterating to make sure the copy is factual and that the tone feels right for the audience and TheLoops’ brand.

Although Notion is not integrated with Fathom, the team takes pointers from Fathom’s AI-generated summaries to prompt content generation in Notion. Prompts can include the type of buyer, the problem/solution offer, tone, and the publishing platform (e.g., email campaign, blog, LinkedIn) to generate relevant copy. When Mullen was working on TheLoops new website redesign, she even used Notion for a project management workflow. “If we see that a specific feature is driving interest across customer calls, we can create a series of assets highlighting that feature with Notion. That’s not something I’ve always had the womanpower to do,” said Mullen.

The team also creates marketing video content using a platform called Descript and they recently started dabbling in a tool called SummarAIze. Kapoor and other company leaders do a lot of webinars and fireside chats that dive deep into the challenges customer experience teams face. Previously, they would have to enlist video editors to turn those live events into evergreen marketing materials like short clips. With Descript, they turn a fireside chat into video outtakes, and audio clips. “What would take us at least 48-72 hours of working with an outside freelancer to create quality content from these virtual events now takes us a couple of hours,” said Kapoor.

Closing the Loop with Product

Fathom summaries aren’t just influencing marketing materials and sales conversations. Key learnings and feature requests are passed on to product and engineering for consideration. And those teams are finding their own efficiencies. Ravi Bulusu, co-founder and CTO of TheLoops uses a combination of his own rough drafts plus ChatGPT and snazzyDocs to create comprehensive user documentation while he is simultaneously adding new features to TheLoops. This helps both customers and new hires. It’s well known that documentation is often the last thing devs want to work on. With GenAI tools, docs not only get written but can also be dynamically created/updated based on sales and support feedback and can become another form of sales collateral.

The team is currently evaluating a couple of different QA testing tools with the goal of automating every code release so that QA testers can be re-tasked as implementation engineers.

“It’s not just sales and marketing that are benefitting from this experimentation,” said Kapoor. “Our whole company is bought in.”

A “Tool Before Headcount” Mindset

A common question about the implementation of AI is what it’ll mean for jobs. For Kapoor, it’s not about replacing people with bots but is instead about being thoughtful about how to apply the people you have. QA engineers can become implementation engineers, and copywriters can expand into campaign managers. And devs can finally realize their dream of coding more and documenting less. “As an early-stage company in a tight labor market, we couldn’t just go hire the dozens of people we needed to get the work done. That drove the curiosity and urgency for adopting AI ourselves as we were building it for our own CX team customers.”

If you’re asking her for headcount, be prepared to explain not just why you need a full-time employee but why you need them in addition to your current toolset. She’s looking for new hires who understand how to augment their skills with GenAI and will join the team leaning into using the latest platforms. “Somya has really led the team by example. In meetings, she’s always pulling Notion or other platforms up and showing us what she’s discovered or connected or tweaked.”

Even with all the current advancements in GenAI, there’s still a long runway for innovation. “There’s room for improvement in how connected all these AI solutions are and in areas like AI understanding the nuance of brand voice. But there’s so much opportunity if you’re curious and open to leveraging what’s already out there,” concluded Kapoor.