New AI App Is Out and It's Redefining B2C Messaging

This week on Funnel Frontier: See how Backstroke's new AI-driven app is reshaping B2C messaging, and explore how Salesforce's new GenAI benchmark is setting standards in CRM.

This week:

• GenAI Backstroke app launches, backed by industry heavyweights 

• Salesforce debuts GenAI benchmark for CRM

• Email marketing: when’s the best time to send? (via EngageBay)

• Airtable vs Notion

• “Wave to surf” marketing ideas (via HubSpot)

Stat of the Week 

Revenue from ERP (which includes ERM, CRM, and other secondary markets), grew 12% last year and should hit $600 billion in 2028. (IDC)

Quantifying the importance of AI

Will genAI upstarts swipe legacy CRM’s crown? Only time will tell, but the seeds of change sure are scattering. 

Enter the launch of a B2C messaging app named Backstroke—a moniker redolent of ease, yet also propulsive power. Ah.

Basically, the app intends to do mass personalization of marketing really well, without the baggage of legacy apps. ”Industry incumbents are ‘Frankensteining’ gen AI features into their platforms. Backstroke is native to these new AI technologies which gives our customers a significant advantage,” said co-founder R. J. Talyor.

But don’t get it twisted. Backstroke isn’t the punk rock fruit of some plucky outsider’s labor. R.J. Talyor is a former executive at emailing marketing vendor ExactTarget (whose software was absorbed into Salesforce Marketing Cloud following a 2012 acquisition). Meanwhile, his wife Allyson Talyor, Ph.D is co-founder and co-leader, holding the title of Lead Data Scientist.

The company enjoys $2M in seed round backing, with leading contributions from High Alpha and Ground Game Ventures, as well as money from Allos Ventures. 

What do early adopters think? 

“The bottleneck to truly personalized CRM marketing has always been human limitations on content production,” opined Doug Bertram, Director of E-Commerce at Pearl iZUMi. “Partnering with Backstroke is a huge step forward in automation, allowing us to deliver more delightful, personalized experiences to our customers.”

The Week @ CRM.org

Types of CRM & How to Choose. Deciding on a CRM is like picking a spouse: do you want operational reliability, analytical insight, or collaborative charm? Choose wisely… 

Free CRM. Yes it exists, with caveats. Like free samples at Costco, these apps are no-commitment, but may just ignite those taste buds. 

Weekly Bloom

Short Attention Span + Mindfulness = Success at Work? Our brains have something called “plasticity.” Turns out that’s useful in our contemporary cognitive jumble.

Salesforce debuts genAI benchmark for CRM

Ta-da. Salesforce has unveiled its LLM benchmark for CRM. 

The idea is to help businesses pick the ideal AI model without ideating into idiocracy. Unlike existing academic-y, theoretical benchmarks, this one tries to glean real CRM data to evaluate models on factuality, completeness, and security. 

Clara Shih, Salesforce AI’s CEO, explains it's all about balancing “accuracy, cost, speed, and trust.” Businesses are not using AI “to plan a kid’s birthday party or summarize Othello,” so Salesforce has built a benchmark that weighs LLMs vis-a-vis CRM use cases. 

Here’s how the benchmark presses the numbers:

• Accuracy: The better the AI’s guesses, the more useful it is—true. And because a bit of tweaking can work wonders, the tool notes if a given LLM can get upscaled via prompt engineering.  
• Cost: High, medium, or low, which way will your spending go? The benchmark evaluates cost by the percentile. 
• Speed: Faster is always better—nobody likes waiting. Hence the measure of response time.
• Trust: It’s important to handle your data like a jeweled scepter on a velvet pillow. Therefore the tool checks an LLM’s adherence to data privacy regulations, information security, and bias. 

Everyone wants smart, cheap, quick, and safe. So if you’re up for it, why not have a good fiddle with the new tool here?

Stellar Strategies: Tips & Tricks for Sales, Marketing & Service

Email marketing: When to send? (via EngageBay)

Since the beginning of time, there has been… time. 

And where email marketing is concerned, time-of-send is near-everything.

According to the metrics, you should forget that spammy Monday morning flood or the lazy Sunday scroll. Aim for the golden hours: 10 AM-ish mid-week, when inboxes are less crowded and people are awake enough to give a care. 

Tuesday and Thursday have the highest open rates. But avoid Garfield’s dreaded Monday—people are too busy nursing strong coffees and massaging their temples. 

Fridays? Everyone's mentally checked out by noon. Saturdays and Sundays? Yeah, right. Basically, think like a well-caffeinated, mid-week morning person, and you'll hit the email jackpot.

More timely tips from EngageBay here.

Airtable vs Notion

Which piques your interest: a hyper-buff spreadsheet or a dainty Swiss Army knife?

Airtable is the former, excelling at handling structured data with robust databases and project management tools. Notion, on the other hand, is your jack-of-all-trades for organizing notes, wikis, and documents with its versatile blocks and pages. 

Notion is cheaper and better for creating docs, yet Airtable's free plan is more team-friendly. Airtable is a data lover’s dream, while Notion caters to the Type A multitasker’s every need. 

Work style and needs, read our big bad comparison.

Out-the-box and wave-to-surf marketing ideas from RedBull (via HubSpot)

Apathy is brand poison, and being top-of-mind is everything. That’s the creed of Dietrich Mateschitz, the Austrian businessman who turned an obscure Thai energy drink into a $16 billion empire via wild marketing antics. His company, Red Bull, is the poster-child of strategic differentiation. 

Of course, slim, tall cans and the iconic "gives you wings" tagline helped cement the brand’s unique identity. But going further, into more wacky territory, Meteschitz had empty cans scattered around London to create FOMO, and reinvested profits into extreme sports events instead of normal ads. 

Metschitz did “wave to surf” (i.e. capitalizing on existing market trends) masterfully.

They got in on the ground floor of the global energy drink craze, of course. But they subsequently surfed the extreme sports wave, with greatest hits including a 39 km skydive from the stratosphere. When “owned media” became trendy, Red Bull bought a soccer team. 

In 1998, they even got into music, promoting some fairly obscure creative figures to buttress the brand’s authenticity.

So if you’re thinking about surfing, why not have a look here.

Galactic Gourmet

CRM blips from around the web

Meta and Samsung alumni join Pipedrive as new CPO and CMO. The high-powered, growth-chasing hires include Viktoria Ruubel (formerly of Samsung and Meta) as CPO, and Sandrine Desbarbieux-Lloyd (Meta-Skype-Intuit-etc.) as CMO. 

Salesforce to hold annual stockholders’ meeting online. Stockholders can click in on Thursday, June 27 at 11 AM PT (2 PM ET).

HubSpot rolls out HIPAA support and tools for sensitive data. The update targets clients in healthcare, insurance, and other regulated industries looking to grow while complying with privacy laws.

Astronomical Assets

Significant Stock Moves from Last Week

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