Julien and Dingyu met through a mutual friend when they were both in the early stages thinking about starting a company.
Julien helped build enterprise sales and PreSales teams at Hootsuite and his own startup, Allay (now called Novo Connection). Dingyu built and led Machine Learning teams for 4 years at Wysdom AI where he created industry leading AI models, collaborated with AI academic researchers, and deployed AI products used by millions of people across some of the largest companies in the world.
Julien had been thinking a lot about challenges he faced managing complex sales and complex sales teams at both Hootsuite and Allay. Complex sales are uniquely challenging because the value to each customer depends on their situation and use cases, there are multiple people involved on the seller side (PreSales Engineers, Account Execs, SDRs, Managers, SMEs, etc) and each sale requires multiple meetings with many stakeholders on the buyer side before a decision is made.
Julien was frequently frustrated because it was difficult to know the details of each deal his team worked on, or to find patterns across all deals. Each sales opportunity generated so much unstructured data across numerous call recordings, note taking documents, CRM notes and fields, and multiple files with data relevant to the deal. There was no easy way to quickly understand what critical information was known or not known about one single deal or to find patterns across all deals.
Dingyu was also frequently brought into his company’s complex sales as a product and AI specialist to help move large deals forward -he was familiar with the same problem Julien experienced.
After hundreds of hours of conversations and idea testing, Dingyu and Julien decided to team up and start Superpanel - to create a better way to manage, win, and learn from Complex Sales.
