Second Nature, the automated AI-powered sales coaching solution, announced the company’s launch alongside a $12.5M Series A round of investment by signals Venture Capital, StageOne Ventures, Cardumen Capital, and Zoom Video Communications, Inc. via the Zoom Apps Fund. With the closing of this round, the total capital raised by Second Nature stands at $15.5M.
The company is the first to offer a software platform for immersive sales simulations in natural language with an AI-powered conversation partner called “Jenny.” Sellers can raise their efficacy while managers can spend more time focusing on generating revenue and less time watching recordings. The solution has already been commercially deployed by industry leaders such as Zoom.
Second Nature solves a key challenge facing large-scale organizations today: how to efficiently ramp-up sellers’ knowledge to drive revenue, confidence and skills. The company’s solution enables sales professionals to get up to speed on new products and services faster, practice selling with an interactive coach, expand sales reach more quickly, and streamline deal closing. Sophisticated algorithms enable Jenny to ask and answer questions, even those that are not pre-scripted.
“After more than a year of our global sales team training and certifying on Second Nature, we truly understand the enormous potential in AI-driven sales training,” said Colin Born, Head of Zoom Ventures. “We decided to become a strategic investor in Second Nature because we’re already enjoying the fruits of this cutting-edge solution – and expect to continue reaping benefits in the years to come.”
Powered by advanced AI and NLP, Second Nature provides virtual practice partners of a variety of ages, ethnicities and genders, that use conversational AI to hold voice discussions with salespeople, score them, and help them improve on their own. The rapidly growing Conversation Intelligence market has, until now, focused on customer interactions. Second Nature creates a judgment-free training and practice space that is ideal for WFH or hybrid teams, and also provides unique team skill visibility and insights to sales managers. Managers and executives can zero in on exactly where their team is lagging and get leading indicators on who will perform better at pushing deals through the pipeline, as opposed to waiting to see the results.
Second Nature was recently named a 2021 Gartner® Cool Vendor in Conversation Intelligence. “Faced with an increasingly virtual selling environment, chief sales officers are investing in technology to improve seller and customer conversations,” according to the report. “CSOs should evaluate conversation intelligence vendors to improve sales velocity, pipeline generation and sales outcomes.” [1]
With Second Nature, sales leaders can accelerate the rolling out of critical go-to-market changes while enabling frontline managers to provide high-impact coaching in terms of performance improvement and deal-level coaching.
“This demonstration of confidence from our new and current investors will help us transform enterprise sales productivity at scale,” said Ariel Hitron, Co-Founder and CEO at Second Nature. “In the growing sales tech landscape, Second Nature has established itself as a leader in AI-powered simulation and role-play for customer facing roles. By helping companies transition their sales coaching from being ad hoc to data-driven and structured, we’re empowering executives to drive real change in their organizations.”
Christian Weniger, Managing Partner at signals Venture Capital, states: “In a world of ever-shortening product life cycles, enabling the sales force to keep the pace and effectively sell new offerings is a key factor to success. We believe that the Second Nature team has built the ideal solution for this challenge and are excited to join them on their journey.”
1. Gartner, Cool Vendors™ in Conversation Intelligence for B2B Sales, By Analyst(s) Robert Blaisdell, Dan Gottlieb, 2 August 2021.
GARTNER and COOL VENDORS are a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
About Second Nature
Second Nature helps people have better conversations. The company is the first to offer a platform for immersive sales simulations in natural language. By practicing with “Jenny” and other AI-powered conversation partners, sales professionals improve their performance and confidence by gaining real time, personalized feedback. Managers and executives use Second Nature to effectively roll out their strategy and influence their teams’ conversations in the field, at scale. The company is based in Tel Aviv and New York.
For more information, please visit www.secondnature.ai.