Trey Allison wants you to know that nuclear engineering is not as romantic as you think it is. Marketing software, on the other hand, holds a certain allure.
“Marketing produces a lead. They work really hard to produce this beautiful, beautiful lead and they hand it over to sales and 90 percent of the time nothing happens,” said Allison, who holds a degree in nuclear engineering from Texas A&M University.
“It’s crazy,” he continued. “There’s a question mark in between those two. Ninety percent loss and efficiency is massive. We figured out the question mark is more meetings.”
In 2018, Allison confounded Kronologic, an Austin-based automated scheduling platform that helps companies get more meetings on their calendars, but only the right ones. On Tuesday, the company announced it raised $3.5 million in seed funding, which it plans to use to staff up — with plans to hire three engineers, one digital marketer, and a director of user experience over the next year — and refine its scheduling software.
The company’s algorithm crunches the type, time, person conducting the meeting, size of customer and more to figure out an appointment’s worth. About a dozen companies use Kronologic, including Dell, Bigcommerce, Gartner and more.
“Kronologic is designed to schedule millions of meetings for thousands of teams. It’s also designed to quantify how much revenue is on your calendar,” Allison said. “It informs you like: ‘Hey are you bringing $2,000 of value to this meeting? You should probably prepare.’”
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Allison said the company focused on how to buy growth, or spend money to generate more revenue. Kronologic had been planning on raising another round of funding, potentially by the end of the year. Now, the coronavirus has changed the business’ priorities.
“We don’t understand what the venture market’s going to look like in six months, a year, two years,” Allison said. “I have no clue. And until we get a better picture of that, we can’t spend money like we used to spend money.”
The nine-person team is now focusing on updating Kronologic’s software so it automatically reflects fresh sales numbers, and schedules appointments to the most profitable individual.
In a perfect world, Allison said Kronologic will assign meetings to the person who can generate the most revenue or lower the cost of an appointment. If a customer needed to schedule a demo, for example, its platform would be able to compare two salespeople’s calendars, see that both have availability and schedule the meeting to the individual who “does a way better job at generating revenue from this meeting type than this other person,” Allison said.
“What’s cool about it is the individual finds themself just automatically getting work on their calendar that they’re good at,” Allison said. “You’re like: ‘Man, I’m really good at these demos. I like doing them. I keep getting them.’”
