"Scaling success is a series of trust falls, with each tier of growth building confidence: the first is the leap of faith, the next steps are the strides towards mastery."
Welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive dialogue with Raja Singh, a trailblazer at the intersection of artificial intelligence and business negotiations.
With a remarkable track record spanning over two decades in CRM software, Raja’s journey from industry giants like Siebel Systems to his pioneering role at Revolear reflects his profound insights into technological advancement.
Raja’s journey from industry giants like Siebel Systems to his current role at Revolear showcases a profound understanding of technological evolution. A visionary entrepreneur, Raja recognized the untapped potential of AI in transforming conventional sales and approval procedures.
In this compelling discussion, Raja Singh unveils the intricacies of infusing AI into complex business dynamics. From generative AI shaping tailored sales proposals to predictive analytics driving optimal deal terms, Raja shares how Revolear marries the flexibility of Office tools with the precision of AI and analytics.
Join us as we delve into the world of AI integration, technology innovation, and the future of business negotiations through the lens of Raja Singh’s visionary leadership.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Raja Singh: I’ve been in the CRM software business for nearly 25 years, first at Siebel Systems, the company that invented the CRM category, and then about 11 years in the Salesforce ecosystem – as a customer, a partner and most recently as the SVP and general manager of their Insurance business.
In all those years of being a purveyor of sales software and as an approver of deals within the companies, I was surprised at how much of the sales and approval processes relied on Word, Excel, PowerPoint and the like.
Those tools provide the flexibility sellers need to negotiate creative deals, but the knowledge within them is often out-of-reach from analytics and machine learning. I started Revolear with the vision of making a system just as flexible as those Office platforms but structured enough to fully leverage enterprise AI, analytics and automation.
Can you share with us your journey towards integrating AI into your business operations?
Raja Singh: Revolear is focused on the business-to-business selling process, which can often take months for complex deals, and involve many twists and turns.
Not surprisingly, there are ample opportunities to apply artificial intelligence in many of its forms. We’re using generative AI – the hot topic as of late thanks to ChatGPT – to distill customer requirements and generate tailored, role-specific sales proposal text.
We’re using machine learning to predict optimal discount levels and other deal terms and create weighted metrics around deal momentum and approval probabilities.
Some forms of AI, like analyzing the sentiment of customer comments, are now mature enough that you can basically just turn it on via Amazon Web Services.
What specific areas of your business have been most impacted by AI, and how?
Raja Singh: We conceived Revolear before ChatGPT sparked the hype around generative AI. We planned to leverage AI in its more established forms, like machine learning and natural language processing.
With all the momentum and excitement around genAI, customers now simply expect it as part of our offering.
We’ve recrafted our message to the market and to our investors to ensure we’re keeping up.
What are the biggest obstacles you’ve faced in implementing AI, and how did you overcome them?
Raja Singh: AI models depend on data to learn, and most of the obstacles in implementing AI still revolve around the data. For machine learning models we create within Revolear on behalf of customers, the obstacle is getting enough data in a format we can work with.
For generative AI, we have the benefit of huge pre-trained models, but then you have to manage the security risks of sending your proprietary data as inputs.
The good news is that modeling techniques are getting better with smaller data sets, and the Large Language Models are putting security features in place.
What advice would you give to other CEOs looking to integrate AI into their business?
Raja Singh: For those outside of the tech industry, AI might appear as some form of the supernatural, and perhaps way too complex for them to spend time figuring out. Those CEOs would likely be surprised by how accessible the underlying AI services are.
Everyone should try ChatGPT, and the image tools like MidJourney or Jasper, so that you have first-hand knowledge of what they do.
We’re to a point where the wins aren’t in the technology but in the clever applications. CEOs need to expose themselves to the possibilities and let their knowledge of their businesses fuel their ideas.
How do you see AI evolving in your industry over the next 5 years?
Raja Singh: Revolear’s purpose is ‘helping companies do business together.’ While our initial applications focus on selling, we also want to incorporate the buyer’s needs into the solution.
Our vision is to be the preferred platform to negotiate a business deal, and we mean preferred by both buyers and sellers.
We’re just in the early stages of exploring how AI can help both parties get their questions answered, quickly find their optimal price and terms, and then secure all the approvals – some of which might be automated. We couldn’t be more excited to keep exploring and moving forward.
What does “success” in 2023 mean to you? It could be on a personal or business level, please share your vision.
Raja Singh: In our business, successful customer references are the ‘coin of the realm.’ Successes create the stories that salespeople tell to prospects, the reviews that prospects find online, the references you put on the website and the learnings you incorporate into the product.
Every tier of customer growth has unique challenges: getting the first is the hardest, as it’s a real ‘trust fall’ moment for them. It gets a little easier at five then 10 then 20.
Then you start having to build the systems that scale. Just like a coach that takes one game at a time, I try to take each growth tier in turn and not get too far ahead of the execution.
I just focus on making the customers successful and have every confidence that I can translate that into success for Revolear as a whole.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Raja Singh for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Raja Singh or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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