Second Nature AI Inc., a startup that helps companies make their sales teams more productive, has raised $22 million in funding to support its engineering efforts.

Sienna VC led the Series B investment, which was announced on Thursday. Bright Pixel, StageOne Ventures, Cardumen, Signals VC and Zoom Communications Inc. contributed as well. The round brings Second Nature’s total outside funding to more than $37 million.

Companies onboard newly hired salespeople by teaching them their products’ value proposition and methods of addressing objections from leads. In a large enterprise with upwards of hundreds of salespeople, the training process can be highly labor-intensive. Additionally, it can be difficult to accurately measure the effectiveness of the training.

Second Nature has developed an artificial intelligence platform that it says eases the workflow. To use it, sales managers must enter a natural language description of a sales conversation their representatives will likely encounter. From there, Second Nature generates an “AI persona” that can simulate such conversations for training purposes. 

Large business-to-business transactions often involve multiple buyer-side stakeholders. Those stakeholders pose different questions to salespeople. In a software deal, for example, the executive who will use the software might have different questions than the administrator who will be tasked with maintaining it. Second Nature says that its AI personas can simulate different types of buyers to improve the relevance of sales training. 

Companies can further customize the platform’s AI personas by uploading internal documents. Second Nature can ingest website pages, knowledge base articles about the product salespeople are tasked with promoting and other content. 

The platform’s data upload feature can also be used to share best practices among team members. According to Second Nature, a manager could upload a recording of a successful sales call and have the platform automatically extract best practices. From there, Second Nature turns those best practices into a checklist that can be used to evaluate newly hired sales representatives’ training progress. 

Customers can also monitor training programs using a set of built-in analytics dashboards. Those dashboards track the amount of time salespeople spend practicing, skill gaps and other data points. Built-in integrations make it possible to sync training data to a company’s other employee training applications.

Second Nature claims that its platform has helped some enterprise customers close 46% more deals. The company’s installed base includes Zoom, Oracle Corp., Adobe Inc. and other major tech firms. 

Second Nature says its platform also has applications beyond sales. Human resources professionals can use Second Nature’s AI personas to filter job applications. Customer service teams, in turn, can train new hires how to process complex support requests.

“The introduction of AI is rapidly changing the playbook for sales, service, customer-facing and go-to-market teams,” said Second Nature co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Ariel Hitron. “Companies use Second Nature to help their teams adapt to this new reality.”

AI-powered employee training software is also gaining traction in other markets, notably the cybersecurity industry. Adaptive Security Inc., which raised $12 million from the OpenAI Startup Fund last month, uses AI to simulate phishing campaigns. Those simulated campaigns enable companies to test the effectiveness of the cybersecurity training they provide to employees.

Photo: Second Nature