In gambling there’s a common saying, the house always wins…After all, the majority of people who spend their nights and weekends throwing dice across the craps table, or contemplating their next blackjack hand are always relying on luck. Yuchun Lee, CEO and co-founder of Allego, is not one of those people.
Yuchun is one of the founding members of the infamous MIT Blackjack card counting team portrayed in the movie 21.With his earnings, he was able to bootstrap Unica which was acquired by IBM for 400 million. Now, Yuchun is back building the next great software company with Allego, an accelerated learning video-based sales platform. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Yuchun explains how his calculated decision-making removes risk and details how it is using A.I. and machine learning to empower every sales professional to close the next deal.
Main Takeaways
- Can You Hop on a Sales Call?: The way companies and sales professionals approach clients has changed drastically over the last year. No longer are tried and true sales techniques closing deals. Now, sales professionals must be able to make a personal connection through Zoom calls instead of one-to-one meetings, which is causing a lot of businesses to rethink their sales practices.
- Just in Time Learning: One of the ways businesses are altering those methods is through just-in-time learning, which are ways to educate sales professionals in real time, by empowering them with the required tools they need to close deals. These tactics are similar to YouTube videos, but instead are hyper-focused on a client’s needs and desires.
- Providing Value: While virtual assistants are becoming more popular in the sales world, there is still no equal to a personal human touch.So, while a lot of the more rudimentary work can be done by A.I. and RPA, there is still an overwhelming need for that one-to-one connection.
For a more in-depth look at this episode, check out the article below.
Article
In gambling there’s a common saying, the house always wins…After all, the majority of people who spend their nights and weekends throwing dice across the craps table, or contemplating their next blackjack hand are always relying on luck. Yuchun Lee, CEO and co-founder of Allego, is not one of those people.
“I don’t believe in the lottery, as you know. I’m a betting man, but I bet on things with high probability and the paradigm I’ve found that suits my philosophy is one where you build a company the right way, one brick at a time. Making sure the business is delivering value.”
Yuchun is one of the founding members of the infamous MIT Blackjack card counting team portrayed in the movie 21.With his earnings, he was able to bootstrap Unica which was acquired by IBM for 400 million. Now, Yuchun is back building the next great software company with Allego, an accelerated learning video-based sales platform. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Yuchun explains how his calculated decision-making removes risk and details how it is using A.I. and machine learning to empower every sales professional to close the next deal.
For years, Lee has been frustrated with the education system, arguing that there are two distinct forms of education; there’s just-in-case learning, which applies to the common practices that students learn through their years in the education system, and then there is just-in-time learning, which is how people learn things when they need them most, much like when someone goes to YouTube to watch how to videos.
“There’s an efficiency difference between just-in-time learning versus just-in-case learning,” Lee said. “[With just-in-time] I’m learning a super set of all the knowledge I need to have in order to solve one problem in the future.”
With that notion in mind, and aided by a global pandemic, online accelerated learning has boomed over the last year. And with that, the need to interact with clients through online video calls has forced a need to change years-old best practices.
“The way we look at the world of selling now raises a few questions,” Lee said. “You need to figure out how to sell virtually because the face-to-face in-person meetings are becoming rare. Even if after all of us have vaccines, a lot of buyers don’t want to meet the sellers now because we’re working remotely,so companies are just beginning to figure out how to engage our marketplace and our buyers remotely.”
One of the ways sales professionals are learning those techniques is through software and platforms such as Allego, which has the ability to pull content and videos based on the needs of the sales person.
“The pandemic has accelerated the need to sell remotely,” Lee said. “There are sets of skills that a seller needs to be better at selling remotely. What we are able to do is articulate value [and build those necessary skills], even though you can’t build that rapport and trust ahead of time. These are all new skill sets that we are leveraging technologies, leveraging videos of people’s faces, leveraging virtual collaboration, to form a new set of activities that actually at the end of the day are more productive.”
What makes Allego different from other video training companies is how it leverages A.I. and machine learning to quickly figure out, depending on the needs of the client, which best-practice videos a seller would need in order to be prepared to meet with a client.
“When I say content, it could be just-in-time learning content, it could be content about a competitor from yesterday, or it could be collateral [a seller] should be using for a particular buyer,” Lee said. “Virtual selling is all about being able to engage, communicate and collaborate virtually. We have capabilities that help you, in essence, simulate some of the interactions you would have in person, but do it online using a virtual room that you can interact with.”
To hear more about the unique ways that Allego is helping develop the next generation of sales people through just-in-time learning, check out the full episode of IT Visionaries!
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