Elips Manifesto

Elips is not about launching another AI company. Our vision results from methodical interviews of more than 300 sales leaders spanning over the course of almost a year.

And Elips is championing a new paradigm for how businesses connect with their customers.

The modern B2B buying journey

For over a century, we used linear sales funnels to model the customer journey: from awareness to purchase. It was linear, simple, and seller-oriented. This traditional sales funnel worked really well when sellers used to control the journey and the narrative.

But today, the modern B2B buyer journey is different: it is messy and non-linear. In the digital age, buyers are in control and often do 80% of their journey on their own. Prospects now bounce between channels, get influenced by peers, and find their own sources for information.

The old sales playbook still works, but it no longer covers the entire buying journey.

The CRM Black Hole

Sales teams have long relied on CRMs to manage their sales operations, usually with linear funnels and processes. CRMs are powerful tools for housing a wealth of interaction and engagement data, tracking every email, meeting, and marketing signal.

Yet, this wealth of data has now become overwhelming: it floods users and often remains unused to its full potential. As the company grows, along with its CRM size, extracting value from data becomes increasingly challenging: data is often outdated, incomplete, and messy. 

Rather than supporting sales processes with a clear direction, CRMs have become a black hole where leads disappear, and valuable knowledge is lost. The data is there, but sales teams cannot possibly keep up with the volume, complexity, and speed of modern buying.

Navigating the Complex B2B Sales Cycle

The B2B space is defined by its unique challenges. Many companies operate with long and complex sales cycles, requiring significant time for prospects to mature. B2B sales are also often relationship-driven and require to engage multiple stakeholders over several touchpoints.

While companies invest heavily in generating leads and initial interactions, only about 5% of prospects are "in-market," meaning they are ready to buy right now. The remaining 95% of valuable leads are only curious or not yet ready. They need time and support to build trust, understanding, and conviction.

This is how leads that are not converted immediately get lost in the CRM after a few interactions.

This isn't just an inefficiency: it's a profound pain point. Companies that can effectively nurture all their leads see tangible results: higher conversion rates, shorter sales cycles, larger purchases, and lower customer acquisition costs. 

In a world where relationships are everything, failing to nurture is a failure to build a pipeline of future revenue.

The B2B Sales Iceberg

Every sales director faces the same challenge: a sales representative can only properly manage a small number of active accounts at a time, typically 15 to 50. Yet, CRMs often host thousands of prospects.

This means that beyond 95% of CRM opportunities are forgotten and unsupervised. The vast majority of potential revenue lies dormant beneath the surface.

This is not a failure of effort, it is a failure of capacity.

The Impossible Nurturing Gap

Nurturing these leads is crucial, but it has been impossible to execute effectively at scale. The reasons are clear:

• Memory bandwidth: whether through natural memory decay, team turnover, or just imperfect processes, it is nearly impossible to remember following-up with each lead at the right time. Even with insanely efficient processes, it is not realistic to ask a sales team to keep in mind every prospect from a client base.

• Unstructured data: CRM data is difficult to manage and often becomes close to useless: incomplete, unstructured and outdated. The unstructured data that provides lead context is just too time-consuming for humans to apprehend and synthesise before taking action on leads that are not identified as top priorities.

• Execution capacity: Tasks are missed and follow-ups become either painfully time-consuming or so generic they fail to move the relationship forward. It is simply not possible for a human to remember and act on every signal from every lead.

Until now, and even with the best automation tools available, it was impossible to manage nurturing as no human can consistently handle the volumes, memory, and complexity required. This results in either generic follow-ups or no follow-ups at all, ultimately leading to significant missed revenues. 

Yet, in modern buying journeys, winning is no longer about managing a linear process supported by a database. Winning is about managing a chaotic web of signals to send the right message at the right time.

Elips: The rise of the AI sales executive

This is why we built Elips. 

We believe that influencing the modern buyer's journey is no longer a human-only task. Beyond generic newsletters, drip campaigns, or strict automation, AI agents can now work like true assistants. Elips AI agents are built to handle what is humanly impossible.

AI agents remember every lead, track every signal and touchpoint, and gather key updates and data. They define the next best actions and execute them for you, ensuring every lead gets the right message at the right moment. 

This is the tactical execution engine for your Go-To-Market strategy.

Elips is much deeper than a new sales solution. It is a new paradigm for B2B sales in a world where relationships have become more valuable than ever. 

We are building a future where tedious tasks and large data sets are managed by AI, so sales teams can spend more time in meaningful conversations that drive trust and growth. 

We envision a future where sales teams work alongside AI agents as naturally as they work with human colleagues. 

We are building a world where no leads are ever forgotten, and every opportunity gets the attention and care it deserves.

Author: Etienne Variot

Etienne is the CEO of Elips, and a serial entrepreneur. He believes modern B2B Buying Journeys are no longer linear, and creating a strong relationship with prospects is more crucial than ever. That’s why he founded Elips to manage complex nurturing to enable sales teams to focus their time on what they do best: build relationships.