Use AI to recession-proof your business! - TRANSCRIPT

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Amir Davani from Rilla. You can Read the interview below, Listen to the podcast or Watch the video.

Karen Edwards: All right. Hello everybody and welcome to Metal Talk. My name's Karen Edwards. I'm really glad that you are here for this today because we are going to do a deep dive into AI, artificial intelligence, with Rilla. So our goal is to better understand what it is and how you can leverage it to help your business. Before we dive in, a little bit of housekeeping. This is being recorded. It will be available on our website within 24 hours, so you can share it with your friends, colleagues or anybody else that needs to see this. So using AI to better your business and recession proof your business is our topic today. And I want to welcome Amir Davani from Rilla. Amir, thank you for being here today.

Amir Davani: Thanks for having me, Karen. I'm really excited to be here. Welcome everybody. I'm the head of sales over here at Rillavoice. We're the leading speech analytics software for the home improvement and roofing industry. Really what we do is when your sales reps go and talk to customers in the home, they record those conversations on our app and then we utilize AI to transcribe, analyze and give them feedback. We're backed by Bessemer Venture Partners and we have been revolutionizing the trades with these AI-powered ride-alongs. So I'm excited to dive in.

Karen Edwards: Very, very cool. Thank you for being here today. Let's start with the basics. We're hearing a lot about AI, but what is artificial intelligence?

Amir Davani: So really the best way to think about this, guys, is AI is really what the internet was back in the year 2000. It completely changed the world, and that's really where we're at right now. It's something that's really coming and it's here to stay. I'm sure a lot of you have heard of ChatGPT, OpenAI's company, that's been transforming the world and the multitudes of applications coming in sales, marketing, call center, financing, education. These applications are really felt everywhere and it is really here to stay. Essentially the best way I put AI is you have the power of thousands of computers just in your pocket and you're able to compute information more than any human ever will. So that's really the biggest thing there.

Karen Edwards: I've dabbled in it a little bit just to try it out and see what it can do. Someone called it like a Google on steroids. I think you're getting a lot of information returned very, very quickly. So let's talk a little bit about how it can be used in construction.

Amir Davani: Absolutely. So obviously on that sales side, that's something that we specialize in. Obviously you guys as business owners and managers, cannot be there out in the field all the time. So from a sales angle, we're making sure that your reps are following that process to make the most out of every lead. Now, operationally, we also have AI generated summaries of different meetings, things like that. Somewhere they take notes for you. From the operation side, you can push these notes into your CRM and essentially have a bookkeeper on you at all times. In terms of marketing, a lot of the emails that you guys are receiving are actually catered to you using AI without you actually knowing. So that's really interesting. As well as a lot of businesses nowadays are generating leads utilizing these different methods. So a lot of lead generation emailing outreach all include AI.

Karen Edwards: Wow. So I did open the chat for everyone. I think I did. So feel free if you have questions, comments, anything to share, drop it in there. I'm curious if you are using it in your business, we would love to hear how you are using it in your business. So it is kind of creepy a little bit to me. Emails tailored directly for me, and I don't even know it that a computer or a machine is sending, but I have noticed that more and more on a marketing side. Let's move on then to talk a little bit about ethics. This is so new. When did this take off? ChatGPT? Was that about a year ago?

Amir Davani: This was about in October, November of 2022, about a year and a half. And really this is an ongoing topic right now, and AI is kind of balancing itself and it really is only going to get better over time. Right now we're really setting the precedence for what's going to happen in the future. So really there's a lot of things here, Karen, that we don't know. And essentially in terms of copywriting, privacy, creativity, all of these things are being garnered for the future today. A lot of things in terms of how your business operates, taking away from employees, AI is taking jobs, there is that argument, taking over the artistic creativity. All of these things are being discussed and being legalized as we speak here.

Karen Edwards: I just saw at the end of December that the New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, I think is the name of the company, and Microsoft because they're claiming copyright infringement from their material. So how does that work if a publication or you put something out on the internet, is it kind of free rein or we're just figuring all that out?

Amir Davani: We're really figuring all that out. Originally, when ChatGPT actually took off, people were creating books. They were literally telling it, write me a book, write me this, this and this. And they were selling those books on the internet as children's books, things like that, images. And that's when I believe a little bit of the line started to get crossed and people did start seeing this as something invasive. So right now there's a lot of good things, there's a lot of bad things. It's balancing each other out and we're setting the precedence for the future there.

Karen Edwards: I think it's finding the good ways to use it, how it can help your business. And let's talk about what kind of impact is AI going to have on the construction industry over the next five years?

Amir Davani: Absolutely. Just coming in, in terms of automation right now, these robots are existing at an extent. If you're going into Amazon, those warehouses, they have people packaging your goods through robots. Same thing with some fast food restaurants that are opening up where there's not a single human there. So that automation really is there and in terms of the next five years, it's been growing exponentially. So we definitely can see that coming in the construction industry. I know, Karen, you spoke about a shingle company that really has been using robots to lay shingles.

Karen Edwards: It's called Renovate Robotics, and he is creating a robot to install asphalt shingles. It's kind of crazy, but in terms of labor shortage, it makes it possible so that you don't need five or six people on that job. You can do it with three people, but you still need the people because somebody's got to put the shingles in the robot, somebody's got to get the robot onto the roof. So I think we're going to be seeing that more in the construction industry is using automation and smart robots and tools to ease some of that labor shortage, I think.

Amir Davani: Absolutely. That's really coming in. AI is really a tool to help you not replace you. That's the biggest thing. It's coming sooner or later whether we like it or not, and we got to be prepared to take the steps necessary to make sure our business can grow at that rate of innovation there.

Karen Edwards: I want to talk a little bit about Rilla because Rilla, as you mentioned briefly in the beginning, but you're analyzing conversations basically. Explain to me how this came to be.

Amir Davani: Absolutely. We have four founders. They all come from Miami area. They all went to school together and they graduated college. And three of them were engineers, AI engineers, software engineers, and one of them, the visionary, our CEO Sebastian Jimenez, he saw that he wanted to capture those conversations that happen offline because 90% of commerce is conducted offline. We're talking about people talking in stores, retail. So essentially he wanted to capture all of these conversations. And what we did was originally we started going in and capturing the conversation in Home Depot, Walmart, Verizon Wireless between those people at the store and the customers that are coming in. What we realized is that these conversations are so short. So in turn, we pivoted and learned more about the home improvement industry and the roofing industry. So we were able to actually capture those conversations between sales reps and the homeowner.

Those conversations are one to two hours long, they're very structured and they can be easily analyzed and seen on what their guys are doing right, what your guys are doing wrong. And essentially, we're able to lift conversion rates of companies, increase the ticket prices and kind of have the manager free up a lot of his time. We're not replacing management here, we're supplementing them to where they have a busy day, they can't go on ride-alongs, they can go in and help their team without actually leaving their home. So that's really the biggest thing that we do here.

Karen Edwards: Wow. I mean, talk about saving time because you're listening to a conversation or you want to be there or be present and learn from it. This kind of does that for you.

Amir Davani: Absolutely. And you're getting the data. Absolutely.

Karen Edwards: The data, that's really important. Tell me a little bit about that. How does it analyze the conversation? What is it giving back to the business owner or to the manager? What are they seeing?

Amir Davani: Absolutely. Basically you would give us your sales process that you guys want to follow that's effective. We put that into our AI, and then when your reps go out and talk to customers in the home, they would just record the conversations and then afterwards those conversations are analyzed and lined up based on your process to see how they're fitting to the script as well as other things. What we noticed is that at top performers of every single company, when they handle objections at the end, they start to slow down their voice, they talk slower, they relax. And another thing that we actually noticed is that top performers talk less. We track the talk ratio with Rilla. Most top performers, they talk 50% of the time, they have higher patience, how long they actually wait to respond. And these things are impressive as well as things like a customer story, how long the customer talks in a row. We see that asking these what and how questions create that. There's a million things that I can go into there, and it's really amazing what we've been able to capture offline.

Karen Edwards: That's fantastic. Knowledge is power and you can learn from it then that's great because you're probably going to close more sales. I'm sure you have a lot of success stories.

Amir Davani: Absolutely. We see a lot of times where the bottom rep at a company is actually able to see what he's doing and see where he can adjust. It can be a simple thing. Sometimes you're given pricing within the first 20 to 30 minutes of a call and you haven't really built the value there. Now sales managers are like, "Okay, don't discuss pricing until an hour and 15 minutes in." It's really simple things like that. And once they actually get that feedback and they get better, they become kind of addicted to it. If you guys have seen the movie Moneyball, it's the same thing in sports. Athletes love to watch film, adjust, and it's the same thing as sales.

Karen Edwards: Great. Now let's talk a little bit about technology and the construction industry, because traditionally the construction industry has not been early adopters. Most contractors are a little hesitant. They might not even know they need this. So how does a contractor go about discovering what their needs are and how to meet the needs?

Amir Davani: I mean, when a contractor's running a business, the biggest thing that really matters is that customer experience. You've got to really shift from what am I not doing to what the customer actually needs? What am I not fulfilling for my customers right now that I could be doing? And here I could leverage artificial intelligence technology to fill those gaps in your business that you can't use. It's really important to be mindful on where you need to recognize and adopt these new technologies because at first, obviously it's not easy, but the sooner that we do adopt these technologies, the sooner that we can actually leverage ourselves. And Rilla aside, obviously Rilla is a great tool for sales and creating that, but really using these technologies make you get the most out of every single lead. So at the end of the day, costs of leads have gone up drastically. You need to make sure that you're leveraging technology to get the most out of what you're spending, and in turn, you can be recession proof that way.

Karen Edwards: Excellent. We're going to talk a little bit too about sales automation. And I know you said this is right up your alley, so share a little bit about the automation, things that we can automate and how that works.

Amir Davani: Got you. I think we have a question here. Privacy between you and the customer.

Karen Edwards: Good.

Amir Davani: I can definitely tie into this here. In terms of privacy, there's one party consent states in America when only the sales rep needs to be notified that the recording, now the two-party states are like California, Florida, Pennsylvania, Washington, Maryland, Montana, Massachusetts, Illinois, New Hampshire and Delaware. In those states we actually conducted data of the homeowners being asked, and we actually saw it as a selling point where I have this level of customer experience and professionalism that my rep's a stranger going into a home is that we're going to record this conversation to make sure our process and our standard is so kept to a point where it's more professional. So that's how that works there.

Karen Edwards: It really is quality control kind of thing. If you ever called customer service and you're waiting to talk to a person and it'll say, "This call may be recorded for quality purposes," it's kind of similar experience.

Amir Davani: It's the same exact way. Even when let's say you get a bad review, or if you get a call about your service not being what was promised by the sales rep, you can go back into that conversation and see really what the point was and what actually happened. And it is essentially quality control. It protects the rep as well as both sides.

Karen Edwards: Christina, she said residential. That makes sense. But pushback from commercial. So do you have customers that are using it for commercial sales?

Amir Davani: Right now most of our sales are residential here. In terms of commercial, that's not something that we've gone into just yet. But residentially, that's what we have as our bread and butter there.

Karen Edwards: Cool. That's a good point. I could see that too. All right, so technology and automation in sales. You mentioned that AI is those emails that are tailored just for me. What kind of other things are happening?

Amir Davani: In terms of really sales training, sales review and the customer experience, just how we use it here at Rilla, we actually use it for our Zoom meetings as well. And essentially we have a team of six reps here under me. What we do is I at the end of the day go in and essentially conduct what I call a virtual ride-along. I see the high level points of their conversation, what they missed and what they didn't hit. And if my five guys are doing four calls a day, that's four hours of calls there, so that's 20 hours, and I'm essentially able to go in and give high level feedback in about one to two hours of that 20 hours of data there. And then I can message them feedback, they get that instantly and then they can adjust tomorrow. At the end of the day, we're all about making sure that that customer is getting the best experience that they have.

Essentially sales is pretty universal. So having this on your residential reps essentially creates that quality control. But not only development, because I mean, Karen, one of the biggest things that we see in the industry as a whole is rep turnover. How many times have you guys hired three new guys and you guys have ended up really sticking out with one? With Rilla, we can identify ways to help them so they actually do stay and actually do develop in the best way that they can. At the end of the day, it is more money in their pocket making more commissions, they feel better. So it really goes a long way on the training side.

Karen Edwards: It's a win, a win-win, right?

Amir Davani: Exactly.

Karen Edwards: So, as a manager, it's a lot of hours of conversation, and I'm imagining myself thinking, "Okay, I've got to listen to how many hours." But how is the information provided to me as a manager or is the AI saying, "Here are things to look at, or here's what we notice," so kind of giving me a summary? How does that work?

Amir Davani: So, when you click on a conversation in Rilla, the first thing that you see is an AI generated summary. This is about six to eight sentences on just one app, and it's just a synopsis. You can glance through that. And then at the side we have the different things. We have the script. We see what parts of the script they hit or didn't hit, and actually a rating of how well they hit it in terms of what our performance is. And this isn't based on any keywords or phrases. We're actually inputting. One of the things that we do, did the rep engage in small talk and talk about anything besides roofs in the first five minutes? We're actually able to go in and see that, and we're not looking for any keywords. We're giving that prompt and it's tailored to that. And if someone isn't doing that, we can see, we give them the feedback, they start working.

And usually what we see is that if you go on Rilla, we're connected with your CRM, so we can see jobs that sold and didn't sell. And if we go on the sold jobs, we see that they're all 13 of 14, 14 of 15, 7 of 8 in terms of the process there. And obviously we have stats, the talk ratio, the customer story, the patience, different things. So all of that's there. And we can also go into analytics and see my reps individually in the last week, what percentage of the time they're hitting this, this and this. And also if you guys have a top rep that really is the best there, obviously his closing rates are higher, his ticket prices are higher, we can actually set him as the top rep so everyone can actually see how they stack up to him so they can be more like him essentially in terms of that.

Karen Edwards: You're kind of making a little competitive, "Here's the top rep and here's where everybody else ranks." Is that motivational for the team?

Amir Davani: I mean, that's optional. It's not even that. It's like, so the top rep, he talks about pricing about 94 minutes into the conversation, I'm talking about pricing 52 minutes in. So what I can actually do is say, "Okay, I see that he's getting more results doing it this way. I can go in there." Or if it's my talk ratio is 65%, the top rep's talking only 45%, I got to just stop talking a little bit there.

Karen Edwards: Listen more, right?

Amir Davani: It's things like that. How long am I spending talking about a certain sequence? Am I laying out the options X, Y and Z? How many times am I laying out these options? Because usually the biggest thing that we see is the reps kind of go in, they're looking for a band aid, and they're not really educating the customer on the different options. And with Rilla we can see, "Okay, you're laying out your options only 42% of the time, this is something necessary." So it's really amazing what we see.

Karen Edwards: Really insightful, I think, and especially for like you said in sports, watching tape and see what I did wrong and what I can fix and improve on. And this is fantastic.

Amir Davani: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Karen Edwards: So, Rilla is part of the MetalVue program. MetalVue is a program that was put together by Sherwin-Williams, and it's got all the tools that contractors need to either grow their business with metal or get started with metal. I think the tagline is Make More with Metal, and they decided to bring together all the tools that will help a contractor succeed, and they kind of vetted different vendors, whether that's lead generation manufacturers, sales analysis like Rilla. So tell me a little bit about the involvement with MetalVue and how that works.

Amir Davani: Absolutely. So looking at MetalVue and Rilla's incorporation, all you guys would really need to do is sign up for a demo and learn more about your business specifically and how it works with MetalVue and how your operations work and to see if it's something that Rilla could be implemented there, so absolutely.

Karen Edwards: How does it work getting started? You mentioned you kind of have to have a sales process. Do I have to have a script? What does it look like to get up and running?

Amir Davani: You actually don't need to have a sales process specifically in place. We have a lot of different ones that we've created based on the 6 million conversations that we have with Rillavoice. Essentially what we would do is we would hop on a demo call, we would learn a lot about your business, we'd show you exactly how it works, and if it's a good fit, you guys are ready to go. We'd get you onboarded there. And to get Rilla up and running, it takes an hour and 45 minutes, essentially.

Karen Edwards: Really?

Amir Davani: It's a one-hour kickoff call. That's where you meet your dedicated account manager. Essentially you'll be working with them, we call them customer success managers because we need to make sure every single customer's successful using Rilla. We talk about scripting, KPIs, different things there, we integrate with your CRM and then it's a 45-minute go live call.

Karen Edwards: What are you seeing from a contractor learns about this and they want to incorporate it? Do you see sales teams excited about it, angry about it? "I'm not going to do that." What's that like the adoption rate and the attitude I guess, of teams that are implementing it?

Amir Davani: Absolutely. It's all of the above there. Obviously sometimes we hear Big Brother, Big Brother, but usually what we see is that that first week obviously it's a little bit different and they start to record. But as they start to look at their stats, look at their own conversations, they get kind of addicted to it. And they do follow the process more when they're being aware of following the process. And in turn, they're making more sales. So the reps are realizing, "Okay, this is a tool for me to actually go in and make more money." And that's when they get really excited, especially if they're improving, it turns into a game. All of my calls on Zoom are recorded. All of my reps, they all have it recorded. And when we have these game film sessions, we sit down and we really try to gamify it.

If someone really handled an objection super well, we'll create that as a clip, and at the end of the week, we'll go through these clips and we'll vote on whoever had the best clip gets like a hundred dollars gift card or something. Things are super pumped up. We like to gamify it. Overall, the adoption, after about a week or two really guys start to like it because call centers are already being recorded and everything. So this is kind of just the next step. I've met a few people at some conferences that have said, we actually put a body cam on our guys. And I'm like, "Wow, that's kind of crazy." And they're like, one lawsuit will do that to you. So really, really it's a lot less than that. And I as a manager, I don't have time to go through 20 hours of conversations every single day. I go in at the high level stuff and look at the data. So I'm not checking word for word. I'm just looking at data at the end of the day.

Karen Edwards: Right. It could feel a little Big Brother like, but like you said, you're not listening to all those hours and hours of conversation and you're looking at the data and you're pulling those nuggets out that are going to help the rest of the team. I think that's really important.

Amir Davani: Exactly.

Karen Edwards: And I feel like, wow, body cameras, but aren't we all kind of used to cameras being everywhere nowadays, from ring doorbells to, I don't know, security systems. It's kind like we're on camera at any given time and it is to see what's going on.

Amir Davani: Absolutely. It is something completely new. But what we see is that reps originally, they hate the record, but they love to listen actually. They love listening to themselves, figuring different things out. And actually, if you guys have someone that's struggling, we can say, "Okay, you need to listen to a few of the top performers conversations, how they handle the objections," and they can actually learn a lot from listening to each other and helping each other. It really turns sales into a really collaborative process when we're all working together. At the end of the day, when a business sells more, they get more referrals, they start to grow. So it's really something amazing that starts to happen.

Karen Edwards: It's kind of a trickle down. You implement this and it really affects the entire business and the entire experience for that customer. Wow, that's fantastic. I'm curious if anybody has any questions out there, or if you are using AI in any way in your business, we'd love to hear about it. But while we see if there are any questions, where do they find you, Amir, how do they get started with you?

Amir Davani: I'll send out a link here to my personal meeting. And did you guys get that there? You guys can just book a time. It can be in a month, it can be in a week, and we can really learn more there.

Karen Edwards: Amir is going to be recording the conversation and using AI to analyze it afterwards, right?

Amir Davani: Absolutely.

Karen Edwards: I'm curious too as to how it's helped you and your team. You mentioned that all the calls are recorded. Have you seen by using your own tool, are you seeing improvements in your team?

Amir Davani: It's like night and day. We use it every single day, so it's really something amazing. If we have a new rep that we're onboarding at the beginning, he's a little shy. He doesn't like it being recorded, but after about a month, after about not even a month or two, I would say a week or two, he's coming to me and he's saying, "Amir, listen to this call. Listen to this call, review this call." It's like he's messaging me and I'm like, "Wow, that's amazing."

Karen Edwards: That's fantastic. I love it. So there's that link. Also, you can find Rilla on metalcoffeeshop.com. They do have a directory out there that has contact information and information, articles, videos, everything that you could possibly need is out there. I just want to thank you, Amir, for spending this time with us and sharing insights into what AI can do, how it can help your business, how it can help sales. I want to thank everybody for watching this Metal Talk. As I mentioned, this is going to be on demand within a day, so if you want to share it with a colleague or friends, feel free to do so. And I'd like to welcome you all each month to come back and join us for future Metal Talks and follow us on social media so you don't miss a thing. Thank you, Amir.

Amir Davani: Thank you so much for having me, Karen. It was great. Thank you.