Innovation

Animis Labs aims to help businesses turn staff into ‘high performance’ sales people

Firm develops collaboration hub to improve outcomes in complex B2B selling situations

Danny O’Neill, founder of Animis Labs: ‘Animis is about collaboration and behaviour change.’

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Olive Keogh
Thu May 7 2020 - 05:00

With businesses keen to get back up and running to offset the impact of coronavirus, reinvigorating sales pipelines will play a key role in the recovery process. That said, really good sales people are hard to come by, according to Danny O’Neill, founder of Animis Labs, which has developed a collaboration hub to improve outcomes in complex B2B selling situations.

“The most successful sales teams are brilliant at three things: customer centricity, collaboration and dynamic account planning,” he says. “These skills could be described as ‘high-performance sales competencies’ and the ongoing challenge for most businesses is getting the majority of their sales teams operating at this level. This is especially important in a world where more than half of sales reps miss their quota.”

O’Neill set up Animis Labs in May last year following six years as a sales and learning strategy consultant. “I had developed some theories about improving the selling process and was able to test these concepts during this time,” he says.

“The results convinced me to take things further and to build the theory out into an actual product designed to help companies address poor sales growth in the B2B space and maximise revenues from existing accounts. I originally come from a scientific background and scientific method is standing well to us as we test and validate our hypothesis.

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Behaviour change

“Animis is about collaboration and behaviour change,” O’Neill adds. “It helps harness the skills and expertise of the wider team to create higher-value customer interactions. It is the first sales application that combines dynamic account planning and behavioural insights to bridge critical skill gaps and improve sales performance. Other tools tend to focus only on process and data analysis.”

Every year companies invest heavily in CRM systems, CX platforms and sales training in an effort to crack the holy grail of consistent and lucrative sales, but O’Neill says the estimated annual global spend of about €91 billion has not generated the anticipated corresponding boost in sales. “These platforms have made some difference by driving standardised sales processes and enabling better customer data capture and opportunity analysis, but by and large they have not delivered. Broadly speaking, 80 per cent of revenue still comes from 20 per cent of sales people. High performance comes from skill and competency, not from tools and processes.”

The Animis Labs team includes O’Neill, who is ex-Dell sales training and development director and former senior Microsoft personnel Clare Dillon and Michael Meagher. The company is based at the NDRC where it is part of the current business accelerator programme. Founder investment is running at just over €100,000 to date and O’Neill is hoping to raise the company’s first seed round by the end of 2020.

The beta version of the company’s cloud-based SaaS solution is currently running with pilot customers in Ireland. The next step will be a UK pilot followed by the full commercial launch, which is currently still scheduled for August.

Launch

The product is aimed mainly at medium to large SaaS and technology companies selling into enterprise customers but O’Neill says it’s also applicable to any business with complex B2B sales. As the company is currently finishing out its product and launch plan, its charging structure has not yet been finalised.

“As Dell was transformed from a box to a solutions provider, I spent lot of time working on sales transformation, particularly looking at the importance of collaboration and skills development to drive sales performance,” says O’Neill.

“Over the last number of years, I’ve worked in a variety of roles in sales, learning strategy and sales performance consulting with a particular focus on changing customer purchasing behaviours and its impact on sales. It’s this experience I’m applying now in Animis because I’m convinced that collaboration is the secret to unlocking great performance and winning more deals.”