- Salespeople of all kinds, from call center employees to sales representatives, are just abundant. For example, in the USA, there are about 6 million of them, which accounts for 13% of all job positions! Moreover, they all need to be trained in sales – either from the beginning or through further qualification.
- As a result, startups with AI trainers began to appear and attract investments, where salespeople are taught to communicate with AI interviewers. And the same technology can be used for hiring new salespeople!
- Sales turnover is 35% per year, with an average of 10-20 interviews before starting a new job. If we insert a candidate check on the trainer before each interview, we will get a potential market of 30 million trainer sessions per year in the USA alone.
- This is a huge market where you can launch your platform designed in this way. But the same approach can be used to assess skills and abilities in other professions as well:
Project Essence
Take2 is a platform for simulating real work, which companies can use in the process of hiring salespeople.
By “salespeople” we mean call center specialists and customer support representatives, sales consultants in stores, trade representatives, B2B salespeople, and other categories of employees who communicate with customers.
To set up the simulator, the company must specify a set of basic skills and additional criteria that a candidate for salespeople must meet. After that, the AI engine will create a suitable simulator based on these descriptions — including AI interviewers and scenarios for them to communicate with candidates.
Now the company can send a link to the simulator to all candidates who have passed the first stage of selection based on their resumes. After completing the simulator, each candidate will receive an assessment — and the company can invite only those who received acceptable scores on the simulator to the next interview.
Using the simulator reduces the time to hire salespeople by 2–3 times. At the same time, the number of salespeople remaining in the job after the first 90 days increases by 50% — because the simulator is successfully completed by salespeople who have enough skills to quickly start producing results and not be disappointed in their new job.
It is considered that the first 90 days after starting a new job are the most crucial period, as during this time, 30% of new employees leave.
Take2 graduated from the Techstars accelerator 4 months ago.
However, it has already managed to attract its first customers. Therefore, it has now raised $3 million in investments.
What’s interesting
There’s nothing new in the technology of creating AI interviewers anymore. Moreover, startups are already emerging that use this approach to create platforms for training salespeople.
This is a very good market because there are only 5.7 million people in the United States who are professionally engaged in sales.
To understand the scale, salespeople make up 13% of all jobs in the United States!
One such startup is Zenarate, which I wrote about last summer. They created a full-fledged simulator for training salespeople using AI interviewers and raised $18 million in investments for this.
Another example is Hyperbound, which I wrote about earlier this year. Last year, they graduated from Y Combinator and have not attracted significant investments since then. The feature of their platform is that it allows you to create very different AI personalities, as if they were in different positions and had different characters – so that employees get used to different styles of communicating with clients.
The specificity of today’s Take2 is that they used the same approach – but not for training existing salespeople in the company, but for selecting new employees.
It may seem like a very small niche compared to training salespeople. But that’s not entirely true!
The turnover of salespeople in the same United States is 35% per year. In other words, every year 35% of salespeople quit, after which almost all of them start looking for a new job – and in the vast majority of cases, again as salespeople, because they don’t know how to do anything else 😉
During the job search, candidates go through an average of 10–20 interviews. Before these interviews, companies theoretically can include a simulator test.
35% of 5.7 million salespeople, multiplied by 15 interviews – that’s almost 30 million simulator passes per year. That’s the potential market size for today’s Take2 in the United States alone. Which looks quite promising 😉
Where to go
Well, basically, this is the direction of possible movement. In a broad sense, it is the creation of platform simulators to assess candidates’ skills during the hiring process.
A clear segment is, for example, similar to today’s Take2, checking candidates’ communication skills on AI interviewers created on the platform.
At the same time, with the help of AI, you can surely create simulators to test skills for other professions.
For programmers, for example, you can give a task to modify existing code to add some functionality or change the logic of its operation. For cybersecurity specialists – to check and fix some vulnerability in the system. For an accountant – to make a journal entry for some complex transaction. And so on.
However, for this, it is worth choosing those professions in which a sufficient number of people work and there is a high turnover – so that a sufficient number of people go through such simulators every year.
What are these professions? What skills and abilities are critical for them? On what tasks can they be quickly tested? How can AI be used to create such tasks and check their completion? How can these tasks be tailored to the specifics of individual companies?
About the Company
Take2
Website: take2.ai
Last round: $3M, April 16, 2024
Total investments: $3.15M, rounds: 2