HeyGen Navigates Hypergrowth with Dashworks AI Assistant

HeyGen, a leading AI video generation platform, has made waves in the industry with its innovative technology and rapid growth. Established in 2020, HeyGen enables businesses to create engaging, personalized videos using AI-generated avatars and voices, transforming video production for marketing, training, and more.

The company is renowned for its rapid product development. In the past few months alone, HeyGen has released an Enterprise suite, a voice cloning product developed in partnership with OpenAI, dozens of new AI avatars, and integrations with tools like Adobe Express and Lattice. It has also launched features like Avatar in Motion, Streaming Avatars, Instant Avatars, Realtime API, and more.

The company's viral videos have captured the attention of millions, leading to rapid growth and attracting top-tier investors. HeyGen's expanding customer base includes high-profile companies like Salesforce, Nvidia, and Amazon. This has led to a significant increase in revenue, going from $1 million to $20 million in annualized revenue.

This hypergrowth has also brought growing pains. We talked with the Head of Sales, Ryan Gross, about some of these challenges, their search for a solution, their partnership with Dashworks, and recommended best practices for teams facing similar situations.

Bridging the Gap Between Sales & Engineering

With its explosive growth in customer interest, HeyGen’s sales representatives increasingly relied on the engineering team to answer complex customer questions, ranging from technical inquiries and bug reports to product feature requests. This hindered their ability to focus on closing deals and driving revenue.

This dependence on engineers created a bottleneck, as the engineering team, already tasked with maintaining a fast shipping velocity for new features and product updates, became inundated with requests, impacting their overall productivity and focus.

“It was a strain on the engineering team to keep up with answering all those questions. We couldn't get to them in a timely way, but a lot of them directly influence a deal. We want to win revenue, but at the same time, we want our engineers focused on launching new features.”

Additionally, the newly formed customer support team struggled to keep pace with the surge in customer inquiries, potentially leading to longer response times or user frustration.

HeyGen needed a solution to alleviate these pain points and ensure sustainable growth without compromising customer satisfaction or product development.

Frictionless Evaluation and Team-wide Adoption

HeyGen implemented Dashworks to bridge the gap between sales and engineering. Dashworks provided a solution by integrating seamlessly with HeyGen's existing knowledge bases and communication channels, including their help center, Notion, Gmail, and Slack. This allowed its AI assistant to instantly answer customer inquiries with relevant information pulled directly from internal resources.

Dashworks’ self-service approach meant that Ryan could quickly evaluate Dashworks' value. Integration with essential tools like Notion and Gmail was straightforward. After the positive initial experience, he added it to a Slack channel where sales team members asked product-related questions.

After a trial, Ryan polled their sales team on whether to continue using Dashworks. The result was overwhelmingly positive, with a significant portion of the team voting in favor of continued adoption.

The Benefits

Unlocking Sales Deal Momentum

Dashworks has automated up to 40% of sales questions accurately without requiring intervention, freeing valuable time for the team to focus on closing deals and building customer relationships. The remaining inquiries received initial responses and sparked further discussions, saving significant time compared to starting from scratch.

Ryan emphasizes the importance of rapid response times:

“It gives sales confidence in answering customer questions that otherwise engineering would have to spend time thinking through. This is crucial, as a quick response can often be the difference between closing a deal or not.”

Empowering Engineering to Focus on Innovation

By handling routine questions, Dashworks alleviated the pressure on engineers, allowing them to concentrate on core product development tasks and maintain HeyGen’s rapid shipping velocity. This resulted in significantly reduced engineering time spent answering questions from sales.

Fast and Accurate Customer Support

HeyGen has also extended Dashworks to their customer support team, enabling faster and more accurate responses to inquiries from their millions of PLG users. By providing the support team instant access to relevant information, Dashworks enabled quicker and more accurate responses, enhancing the overall customer experience.

Onboarding Buddy

New hires, especially in sales and support roles, found the Dashworks AI assistant incredibly helpful in quickly getting up to speed with product knowledge and internal processes. This accelerated onboarding and reduced ramp time, especially as they rapidly expanded their team in the hypergrowth stage.

Streamlining Security Questionnaires

Ryan also discovered an unexpected benefit of using Dashworks – easily tackling security questionnaires. Previously, completing these questionnaires required back-and-forth communication with the engineering and product teams, consuming valuable time and resources. With Dashworks, Ryan can now independently find accurate answers to security-related questions by simply querying the platform. Dashworks' access to HeyGen's internal documentation and knowledge base ensures that Ryan receives reliable and up-to-date information without involving other team members.

Recommended Playbook

Ryan recommends the following playbook for other customers facing similar challenges or looking to adopt Dashworks:

• Align on Purpose and Process: Clearly define the purpose of using an AI knowledge assistant and establish a process for its integration into workflows. Ensure cross-functional buy-in and understanding of how the tool will be used. For instance, add it to a Slack channel with the askers and the responders. Ensure all team members understand the purpose and protocols of using Dashworks within designated communication channels.
• Start with Key Knowledge Bases: Prioritize integrating Dashworks with essential knowledge bases and communication channels to maximize its impact on information retrieval and response times.
• Establish a Response Hierarchy: Define a clear escalation path, for instance, starting with Dashworks' initial response, followed by sales representatives, and finally, engineers for complex issues.
• Continuously Train and Improve: Provide feedback and actively engage with Dashworks to refine its understanding of your company's knowledge and processes. This ongoing training will ensure its effectiveness and accuracy. Actively train Dashworks by providing additional context and information beyond simple yes/no answers, improving its accuracy and knowledge base.

“Dashworks has helped us understand what questions to ask and where. We entirely reorganized our cross-functional feedback around it.”

Looking Forward: Dedicated Agents for GTM Workflows

HeyGen envisions Dashworks playing an even more central role in their operations. They aim to leverage Dashworks as a dedicated "agent" for various departments and channels, including legal, security, and customer onboarding, streamlining information access and task execution across the organization.

Dashworks has proven a valuable asset for HeyGen, enabling them to maintain their fast-paced growth while ensuring efficient knowledge sharing and collaboration across teams. If your company faces similar challenges in balancing sales velocity and engineering focus, consider exploring how Dashworks can empower your team and accelerate your business.