How Gusto’s Will Alexander made an AI tool that drives revenue

Will Alexander isn’t an engineer, but Gusto’s head of account management and AI transformation took a crack at building an AI tool and created a platform that significantly impacted his sales team.

Roughly nine months ago, Alexander introduced an AI tool to the online payroll, benefits, and HR platform’s sales team called DayPlay, which is an internal system that takes on tasks like automating account prioritization and identifying expansion opportunities.

The results have been swift: Gusto’s sales team increased its customer-facing time from around 35% to 68%, opportunities using DayPlay are 2.7x more likely to close, and the ARR of those deals has increased by 166%.

Revenue Brew sat down with Alexander to talk about DayPlay and the benefits he’s seeing across Gusto’s sales team.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Why did you see a need for DayPlay?

The way we approach our customers hasn’t changed in decades. It’s always the same. Ever since I started my career, the goal is to have the team in front of our customers more, so we can serve our customers better. Around nine months ago, I was really thinking about this and where the team spent their time. The team wants to be spending more time with customers and the customers want to be spending more time with us. But, we’re spending all of our time in spreadsheets and CRMs and going through Salesforce. It’s like, why? How can I spend more time with our customers? DayPlay was born in my mind and it was like: How can we give the team signals on what our customers are doing? Where they need help, where they’re paying without them telling us, and then prescribe a solution so the reps can connect with their customers in a really personalized way with really targeted insights.

What types of tasks are automated through this system?

There’s a lot of automation and I really would love to say it’s automation not at the cost of personalization. It’s actually made things hyperpersonalized…We have machine learning in DayPlay. What it’s doing is seeing which emails have the highest open rate, click-through rate, and booking-a-call rate, and it will learn which emails are having high success. Then it will update all the other emails with those premises as well. It’s like this always-on machine learning feature and then the rep can just focus on doing what they’re good at, and that is speaking to customers.

How have these automations improved efficiencies across your team?

Before we were spending about 30%–35% of our time with customers. We’ve grown that to 68%. We’re now spending the majority of our time with customers and when we’re not, we’re working on the hyperpersonalized prep. We’ve been able to touch more accounts with that time, and so there’s efficiency around book coverage and building relationships. We’ve just gained some efficiencies around the way that we sell, so we’re able to go into a call with more insights on products and services that they should adopt, instead of going in the call and doing tons of discovery.

How has DayPlay improved results?

When we connect with customers and we’re providing our products and solutions, the close rate on those opportunities is 2.7 times higher than those that don’t. Those opportunities typically bring in 166% higher ARR than opps that didn’t [use DayPlay], so our win rate is increasing. The ARR for opportunity is increasing because we’re able to prescribe more solutions, and then when we rolled this out to the team, adoption was like 25%–26%. When reps really started to get in there and see the results that it was generating—I think it was over a two-week period—we grew that to 98%. Basically everyone is using it now.

How do you plan to grow the tool to continue growing results?

The way we want to develop this further is: How do we get that 68% to 90%? We want to be spending more of our time with our customers and the thing is our customers also love that. The best thing about Gusto and our product is customers love us and love the product, and we’re not typically selling to customers. It’s more just like we can help you get more time back in the day as a founder, so extending our reach to be spending more time with our customers.