Episode 5 – The Future Starts Here

After four episodes unpacking the ugly truth of today’s enterprise sales process — the broken discovery, the wasted SME hours, the lost context in handoffs — Episode 5 becomes the bridge. This is where Kevin kunz takes listeners from problem mode into solution mode. Instead of just circling on inefficiencies, he introduces the idea of a new way forward: intelligent hives that listen, learn, and support sales without the endless human overhead. Episode 5 sets the stage for the pivot into Hyvara.ai by showing how technology can replace chaos with clarity — and why the next chapter isn’t about adding more tools, but creating one intelligent system that connects them all.

Transcript

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Hey folks, welcome back to the SE Work Life Podcast. I am Kevin Kuhnz, your host. Today, Hyvera.ai episode five. Remember, we're doing 10 episodes here of podcast-like style to give you a scenario of what we're working on here at hivera.ai. Uh, give you the good, the bad, the ugly, right? Every story has a beginning, middle, end of villain and a hero. We're at that point now where we're pivoting more to the hero in the story. The future starts here. Probably be about 10 minutes in length, so you can enjoy your day. Well, let's get right into it. So, you know, if you're you've been following the first four episodes, you've heard the full picture, the complexity, the missed questions, the stakeholder gaps, the broken handoffs, and the millions lost in the cracks between sales, pre-sales, implementation, and customer success. That full infinity loop of buying and ownership side. This is not just about the first nine or 12 steps of a sales process. It's the full customer, 360-degree view and relationship. So we've talked about the ugly picture, the way it works today. Now it's time to talk about the art of the possible. You know, the front of the glass, back of the glass. You've heard it all in the number of years. I remember at Adobe, there was this Scottish guy, I forget his name, if he's listening to this podcast. Um, he was fantastic. He was from professional services, and he was a great presenter. Uh, I really envied the way he presented. And he used to present the art of the possible was his tagline. So we're going to steal a little bit of that today. So I'm going to walk you through the vision of Hivera.ai, what it is, how it works, and how it should change everything we've been talking about. This is the turning point. We're done diagnosing. It's time to start building. Why this needs to exist? Let's start with the why. Before we jump into features and capabilities, let's get clear on the why it matters. In enterprise software sales, the number one enemy isn't the competition, it's friction. Friction between the AE and the SE, friction between the specialist on the same deal, friction between sales and delivery, friction between what was promised and what actually got delivered. And every time there's a gap in knowledge, a missed stakeholder, or a repeated conversation, trust gets eroded. And in B2B SaaS, once trust is gone, it's almost impossible to get it back. We don't have a selling problem. We have a coordination problem. And the cost of that problem is measured not just in lost deals, but in churn, missed upsell opportunities and burned out teams. Hivera AI exists to remove that friction. What is Hivera AI? Well, at its core, Hyvera AI is an AI-powered sales execution partner. Not just a research bot. It's not just a meeting assistant like Otter and the others that you see here today. And it's not just a dashboard. It's the connective tissue between every stage of the revenue process, from the first discovery call to the customer's third-year renewal. It sits alongside your existing workflow, listens, learns, and helps you, your team, do three things better than they've ever been able to do before. Number one, ask the right questions at the right time. Two, capture and carry forward the full story of every deal. And the carry forward part is really important. We have missed handoffs and handshakes between the front-end team to development, implementation, and support. Every stakeholder, internal and external, needs to be aligned on the plan. So those are the three things that we're going to focus in on here in this podcast. Ask the right questions at the right time, capture and carry forward the full story of every deal. Keep every stakeholder, internal, external, aligned on the plan. A Hivera.ai difference. Let's break that down into real-world capability shifts. Number one, real-time discovery prompts. Think about the last time you were on a call and realized after the fact that you forgot to ask a critical question. In frameworks like MedPIC and Beamanter, those gaps can be fatal, missing who's the economic buyer or what's the measurable impact can sync the deal months later. In real time and prompts you discreetly when those moments come up. If the AE is talking to a director of operations, Hyvera might surface as the CTO is involved in the decision-making process. No more scrambling after the call to fill in the blanks, no more losing deals because the right questions wasn't asked at the right moment. Number two, stakeholder mapping and gap alerts. Hyvera automatically builds a living stakeholder map for each deal. As new names come up in the conversation, it tags them with their role, influence level, and connection to the decision process. If a critical role hasn't been engaged, say compliance and regulatory industry, Hyvera flags it before you advance the deal. That way you never get blindsided by the invisible veto. Remember, we talked earlier about the ARB teams, architectural review board teams back in the day on-prem. These were killers at the last minute. You know, you learn your lesson, so you bring them in earlier in your next meeting. Number three, knowledge of handoff across the revenue cycle. This is where we fix the post-sales problem from episode four. Every note, every answer, every success criteria captured during the pre-sale is automatically organized and shared with professional services and customer success or a partner for that matter at the exact moment they need it. No more re-asking the same questions, no more CSMs wondering why the customer bought this in the first place. Everyone sees the same source of truth. So every conversation feels like a continuation and not a reset. You know, a lot of folks on the call here might be saying, well, don't I have a CRM to do that? CRMs are flat. They're not bi-directional and conversational. They're just flat databases. You can't have a flat database predict and help you. Machine learning, natural language processing, large language models, these things all exist now for a reason. And that's what we're talking about here today. Number four, embedded compliance and value tracking. In regulatory industries, compliance is often the slowest part of the deal. Hiverican prompt discovery questions that ensure compliance requirements are gathered up front. It also tracks value metrics from the first meeting. So when it's time for renewal, you can point to exactly how much time, money, or efficiencies you've delivered. That's what turns renewals into expansions. A before and after story. Let's make this sort of real if we could. So let me give you a before and sort of what would look like after Hyvera. So before Hyvera, we had talked a little bit about, let's talk about this person named Maya. Maya is an AE working on a $750,000 deal. She and her SE run a great demo. They never identified the real budget owner. The deal stalls late when procurement routes it to the CFO, who's never even met the team. Professional services starts implementation with incomplete requirements. By the time customer success takes over, adoption is slow and the renewal is at risk. Now, I took like a 12 to 18 month process and shrink it down into like one paragraph here. But there's a lot involved in this, right? The amount of monies and times. With Hyvera, on the second call, Hyvera prompts Maya to ask who else will need to approve this purchase. She learns about that CFO early, brings them into the value conversation, and captures her success criteria. When the deal closes, Professional Services already has the integration list, success metrics, and stakeholder map in hand. Implementation hits the timeline. Six months in, the CSMs used the original success metrics to show a 28% reduction in onboarding time, opening the door to a cross-sell into another division. Same product, same team, different process, because the information flowed exactly where it needed to. That doesn't happen today. Why this works? Well, here's the thing: none of this is magic, right? It's not about replacing people. It's about giving them the context and prompts they need when they need them so they can focus on the human side of selling. Relationship is not going to go away. People are not going to buy from AI bots. They're still need to buy from people, but people are flawed. They get frustrated. They get anxiety. They forget to ask questions. You need an agent alongside of you in order to provide all those necessary cues or even participate directly with the client. Iver doesn't just capture data, it activates it. It turns past conversations into future wins. It makes sure the knowledge you work so hard to collect in discovery isn't lost in a forgotten slide deck or a closed calendar invite. The vision. Well, if you think about the sales process as a relay race, today's reality is messy. Batons get dropped at every handoff. Hivera's goal is to make sure the baton never leaves the runner's hand until the finish line. And even then, it's ready for the next race. The outcome, well, hopefully, and this is what our expectation or our bet is, is win rates go up, churn rates go down, expansion becomes the norm, not the exception. And teams feel more in control, less reactive, and more energized. And you know what? The customers, yeah, yeah, let's talk about the customers. They're kind of the most important people in this process. They feel like they're working with one coordinated team, not three disconnected departments and uh what we used to call at Oracle, the Oracle bus of people who dress differently, have different slide decks and competing agendas. What's next? In the next few episodes, I'm going to take you inside specific Hyvera capabilities and show you exactly how they play out in the real world. We'll look at deals from start to finish, first meetings, multiple stakeholder engagements, pilots, implementations, and see where the AI steps into things moving forward. You'll hear from design partners who've helped shape the product and from teams who've seen what happens when you finally remove the friction from the sales process. The future of pre-sales isn't about more tools, it's about better flow, better alignment, and better outcomes. And that's the future hivera.ai is here to deliver. Feel free to just visit hivera.ai. We have our landing page out there now. Um, as I said earlier, my name is Kevin Kuhnz. Uh, you know, I've been doing this for a long time. And, you know, in retirement, uh, as I mentioned earlier, I really can't learn how to bowl. Uh, this is the way it's gonna be, and I'm enjoying every bit of it, learning so much. And thanks again for all the participants in the podcasts from earlier shows, and I'm excited to see what comes of this next. Uh, until then, we'll get into episode six, built around one hero capability, maybe the stakeholder mapping. So the pivot into the solution arc you know will feel pretty exciting. Talk to you soon.