People.AI announced a partnership with Zoom Video Communications to deliver its sales engagement intelligence alongside Zoom’s conversational intelligence within Zoom IQ for Sales. People.AI buyer role and engagement insights will be combined with Zoom’s conversational sales intelligence. The joint solution also supports cross-channel engagement data, post-call summaries, and contact creation and enrichment.
The combined solution will provide “greater visibility into buyer engagements, enabling go-to-market teams to access previously buried insights,” said the firms. “Sellers will have the ability to engage the right people in the right accounts, resulting in pipeline predictability and revenue.”
Revenue teams will enjoy greater pipeline visibility, helping de-risk deals and drive revenue growth. During calls, a side panel will provide an “unparalleled understanding of ‘who is who’ within accounts and opportunities, empowering your sales teams to strategically plot next steps with the right people and personas to grow pipeline, drive larger deals, shorten sales cycles, and improve win rate.”
“Zoom has been a customer of ours since 2017 and a business we’ve always admired,” said Thomas Wyatt, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at People.ai. “Our joint customers will soon be able to leverage Zoom’s world-class conversation intelligence solution enriched by buyer and relationship intelligence that only People.ai can provide.”
During Zoom Calls, People.AI displays Stakeholder Insights that include contact information, engagement levels, and connection overviews.
Zoom IQ for Sales was launched in April and provides a host of standard conversational sales capabilities, including sentiment analysis, engagement scores, talk-listen ratios, the longest monologue, filler word frequency, a snippets library, and competitor and feature mentions. Furthermore, it includes a few differentiators:
Engaging Questions – Analyzes questions posed to determine the frequency with which customers respond to queries.
Next Steps – Assesses whether clear next steps are outlined during the meeting.
Patience – Determines whether reps wait for a response after asking a question.
Post-deal analytics include which topics arose most frequently, time spent in each stage, and which negotiators made the final purchasing decision. General Deal analytics include the number of conversations per deal and the duration of conversations per deal.
Zoom IQ for Sales is available for Zoom and Zoom Phone. It is “tightly integrated” with Salesforce, Google Calendar, Office 365, and Exchange. Zoom IQ for Sales is priced at $79 per month per seat.
“Zoom IQ for Sales analyzes customer interactions to surface key insights, actions, and content from sales meetings. Sales leaders can also use this data to help make better-informed management decisions regarding their sales teams,” blogged UCaaS Product Marketing Manager Theresa Larkin. “With actionable insights based on proven sales strategies and a wealth of data, organizations can streamline the new sales rep onboarding process, create a modern sales methodology, and further develop their sales teams.”
Zoom IQ for Sales conversational analytics
Zoom describes Zoom IQ for Sales as its “First Step in Conversational Intelligence.” The service is “tightly integrated” with Salesforce, Google Calendar, Office 365, and Exchange. Insights include
Engaging Questions – Analyzes questions posed to determine the frequency with which customers respond to queries.
Longest Spiel – Identifies the longest monologue to help reps hone their pitches and avoid monologues.
Next Steps – Assesses whether clear next steps are outlined during the meeting.
Patience – Determines whether reps wait for a response after asking a question.
Talk-Listen Ratios – Analyzes whether there is a balance between lead speaker talk time and time granted to others.
Competitor and Feature Mentions – Tags competitors and product features so reps, competitive analysts, and product teams can drill into prospect concerns, competitive statements, and potential gaps in the product.
Post-deal analytics include which topics arose most frequently, time spent in each stage, and which negotiators made the final purchasing decision. General Deal analytics include the number of conversations per deal and the duration of conversations per deal.
Zoom IQ supports a video snippets library of best practices exemplars. Snippets can be used for initial training or for reviewing how to handle specific objections, present the value of various products, or position across target verticals.
Zoom Sales IQ Playlists
“Zoom has made strategic investments in homegrown speech recognition technologies and recruited a world-class team to produce high-fidelity transcription services that are a backbone for products like Zoom IQ…We’re developing domain-specific NLU (natural language understanding) using few-shot models to build features that will be more reliable and valuable to our users,” said Josh Dulberger, Zoom’s head of product, data, and AI. “Sales teams…want to focus on the customer, and managing the engagement rather than taking notes, but also so they can review their calls to pick up nuances, easily identify next steps, or solicit some guidance from a colleague. Managers and sales leaders can’t sit in on every call but want to understand the selling climate, when to coach, and which reps are finding the right message.”
Zoom IQ for Sales places Zoom in competition with many of its partners, including Salesloft, Outreach, Chorus, and Gong.
TechCrunch Senior Report Kyle Wiggers cautioned buyers about Zoom’s AI capabilities: “The jury’s out on the accuracy of Zoom’s algorithms, particularly given the company’s history of deploying flawed AI. Sentiment analysis algorithms are especially prone to gender and race bias, and not every salesperson will necessarily agree with how Zoom measures engagement.”
“Zoom is almost certainly feeling the pressure from investors to establish new lines of revenue,” continued Wiggers. “While the company’s earnings soared during the pandemic, guidance is down as customers begin to shift to hybrid and in-office work arrangements less reliant on videoconferencing.”
Zoom IQ for Sales is priced at $79 per month per seat.
“Half a million businesses choose Zoom and rely on it for internal and external conversations,” said Dulberger. “The Zoom platform already has a strong foundation in this area with features such as transcription, recordings, and highlights. This also gives us an opportunity to expand this type of functionality across the Zoom platform such as Zoom Contact Center and within our meetings and events solutions to help presenters pace their speech, take notes, capture action items or employ specific tactics.”
Zoom Events, Zoom’s platform for virtual and hybrid shows, is adding a backstage feature that lets panelists, speakers, and production crews meet before, during, and after events. During the session, support staff can view the webinar feed, chat with each other, answer attendees’ questions, and practice their presentations. Zoom Events Backstage should be available by the end of April.
Other new Events features include branded wallpaper that displays behind tiles and webinar reactions.
Vidyard redesigned its video creation and collaboration platform with a set of enhanced editing and security features. New capabilities include a Zoom integration, updates to its video hosting platform, an Android app, video commenting, and single sign-on (SSO) security.
The service continues to be available on a freemium basis with a series of tiers from free to enterprise (see the pricing table on the right).
Vidyard added new on-screen drawing and highlighting tools to its webcam and screen recording service. Users can customize videos by highlighting their screens with a variety of brush sizes and colors. When recording their screen and webcam at the same time, users can move their camera window on-the-fly to avoid covering up important visuals. Users may also add speaker’s notes, bullets, and talking points “on-screen, directly above their webcam.”
Vidyard updated its iOS app and added an Android app, helping users “record and share videos anytime, anywhere.” Videos may be quickly recorded and shared with a branded video sharing page. Both the app and desktop applications share a common video library, providing access to the same set of pre-recorded videos.
Viewers can leave comments and replies to shared videos, allowing colleagues and prospects to collaborate, provide feedback, or ask questions. The senders receive comment notifications to help expedite closing the communications loop. This feature is available for Pro, Teams, and Enterprise users.
Pro, Team, and Enterprise video users may secure access via private passwords and SSO.
New enterprise features include transcribing, closed captioning, video thumbnail customization, viewer permissioning, and publishing to public and private channels.
A new Zoom integration for Business and Enterprise licensors lets users automatically sync recorded Zoom calls into their accounts once the call completes. Recording security features include SSO and passwords. Recorded sessions may be viewed on a dedicated video sharing page.
“Businesses are quickly evolving their sales, marketing, and communications strategies to align with a digital-first communication world. Video is a huge part of that, as it’s simply more efficient, more expressive, and more effective than standard text. Today’s businesses need a simpler, smarter, and more scalable way to put the power of video into their people’s hands. We’re excited to deliver on that need with a new breed of video creation and hosting solutions that turn any business professional into a video creator and any organization into a video-first business.”
Vidyard CEO Michael Litt
“We’re only scratching the surface of how video can be used to create a more connected, engaged, and efficient workforce in the digital age,” said Vidyard VP of Marketing Tyler Lessard. “With the barriers to video creation and sharing all but gone, we’re excited to see how businesses across all markets will capitalize on the power of video in the months and years ahead to enhance everything from sales and marketing to internal communications and employee engagement.”
Vidyard has 220 employees based in Kitchener (Ontario), Vancouver, Boston, and Dublin. The firm’s conversion rate from freemium to paid has increased during the pandemic.
Tomorrow I will be discussing the Vidyard integration into Alyce’s Personal Experience (gifting) platform.
SalesLoft Conversation Intelligence transcribes and indexes meetings and conference calls to share with stakeholders. Photo: Zoom Meeting Intelligence
Sales engagement vendor SalesLoft rebranded its Meeting Intelligence functionality as Conversation Intelligence. SalesLoft describes four sets of features which help reps schedule meetings and then listen to, understand, and engage with customers and prospects. SalesLoft supports a broad set of conversation tools including appointment setting; automated recording, transcription, and indexing of calls; time-stamped notes, and call analytics. This functionality is available for prospect, customer, and internal calls. Managers, mentors, and trainers can join calls or whisper into a sales rep’s ear.
“Through
the evolution of SalesLoft’s platform and user experience, one feature has
changed so much that its prior name no longer did it justice,” wrote SalesLoft
Head of Community Aly Merritt. “Meeting Intelligence is now Conversation
Intelligence, because sales isn’t just meetings – it’s every conversation and
interaction.”
Call
recordings can be stored in a training library or shared for coaching or
questions. For example, if a sales rep does not know the answer to a
question, it can be forwarded directly to customer support or engineering for a
response.
Conversation
Intelligence supports both SalesLoft’s native dialer and leading web meeting
applications: Zoom, GoToMeeting, join.me, UberConference, Cisco WebEx, and
Cisco WebEx Enterprise.
Sales calls come in many forms: prospecting, discovery, demos, stakeholder alignment, and so on. All of these interactions make up the foundation for the long-term customer relationship. High-value customer relationships are made possible when prospects feel that the relationship they are entering into is mutually beneficial.
How can you build such a relationship? By working to ensure your prospects feel heard and confident that you understand their needs. Work to engage them throughout their journey. After all, sales doesn’t stop when the deal closes, nor does engagement cease when a seller hangs up the phone.
▪ SalesLoft Product News
SalesLoft said that it is “designed to flex around the needs of the user based not only on their role but also on their preferred workflow. This empowers SalesLoft customers to offer consistent value at every stage.”
“Sales meetings are the moments in the sales cycle where you have the opportunity to provide the most value for your customers. As such, they are some of the single biggest opportunities for your team to influence revenue. It’s where your deals are won and lost,” wrote the firm. “Despite this, sellers often don’t get the opportunity to improve on this critical component of the sales process. Combine this with the challenges that face sales leaders around how much time it takes to digest sales meetings, gain visibility into what’s really happening, and be proactive in the deal cycle.”
SalesLoft Meeting Intelligence transcribes and indexes Zoom calls to share with stakeholders.
I always enjoy hearing about companies eating their own dogfood, but it is rare that it is the CEO utilizing his or her own platform to demonstrate product value post-sale and collecting meaningful customer intelligence.
Last week, Kyle Porter gave a master class on how he has deployed SalesLoft functionality to build relationships with SalesLoft’s top new clients. Not only does it magnify goodwill at the beginning of a relationship, but Porter garners insights into his company’s product and sales process while offering tips to new customers.
Briefly,
here is how SalesLoft leverages Salesforce and SalesLoft to delight its top
customers:
Salesforce kicks off a cadence email for each closed/won opportunity over $50,000. The email is a congratulatory note to the primary account rep who closed the deal. It includes a request for an introduction to the executive sponsor.
The email is forwarded by the sales rep to the sponsor with Porter cc’d.
Porter responds and forwards his open times (SalesLoft calendaring technology)
Porter joins the Zoom call with four objectives: Thank them for their business; solicit feedback on the SalesLoft sales experience; share the company vision and roadmap; and share three pro tips which “If they get out ahead of these, they will be wildly successful in sales engagement.” (Zoom is a SalesLoft partner)
The SalesLoft bot automatically transcribes and analyzes the conversation which is shared with internal stakeholders.
Porter sets up a follow-up cadence for six months later.
Before sales
engagement, this would have required a substantial number of manual tasks and
likely have been limited to top brands or million-dollar contracts. But
with SalesLoft’s cadence and meeting management tools, it is likely that the
time involved on the sales side is four minutes for Porter (note response and
scheduling the six-month follow up), two minutes for the sales rep (email
forward), and the time meeting with the executive sponsor at the new customer
(a high-return use of Porter’s time).
Sales Navigator now supports custom Account and Lead lists.
LinkedIn rolled out its Q4 Sales Navigator release in November, but I failed to blog about it. (Q1 will be covered next week in this blog.) The release contains several nascent initiatives including custom lists and the collection of “Reports To” data to assist with organizational mapping. Other feature sets include three new alerts, an improved accounts center, PointDrive activity logging, and additional SNAP connectors.
LinkedIn is
beginning to collect data around who reports to whom. As sales reps or
others learn about reporting relationships, they can add them to executive
profiles. The data is then shared across the LinkedIn contract with
co-workers but not more broadly. Following after last quarter’s support
of buying committees, it is evident that LinkedIn is looking to infuse
additional project and reporting relationships within Sales Navigator.
“We’re
laying the foundation for full-blown org charts by adding a new “Reports To” field
on the Lead Page,” blogged Head of Products for LinkedIn Sales Solutions Doug
Camplejohn. “Once you learn who someone’s manager is, you can add that
info to their page by searching for a name or browsing our recommendations. Any
additions you or your colleagues make will only appear to those in your
company’s Sales Navigator contract. So, the next time you or a team member
looks that lead up, you’ll see who they report to, who added that connection,
and a reporting history.”
An unlimited
number of custom lists of accounts or leads may be built within the LinkedIn
desktop or mobile app. Users may post notes on saved leads or accounts and
filter the lists by people who have changed jobs in the last 90 days, people
who have posted on LinkedIn in the past 30 days, companies who have had senior
leadership changes in the past 3 months, etc.
LinkedIn does not yet support custom list uploading. Custom Sharing is part of the Q1 release.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator added three new alerts
LinkedIn added three new alerts:
Someone at a saved account viewed your profile
A saved account has just raised funding
A saved lead has engaged with LinkedIn posts from your company
which
accompany six current alerts:
A saved lead started a position at a new company
A saved lead has a new position within the same company
A saved lead viewed your profile
A potential lead recently joined a saved account
A saved lead has accepted your connection request
A saved lead was mentioned in the news
Alerts are
now included in the main menu bar of both the desktop and mobile editions. Camplejohn
noted that LinkedIn has improved the “signal-to-noise ratio” of its alerts.
“Think of
our Alerts as a trusted sales advisor tapping you on the shoulder with
information about your saved leads and accounts when it’s most important and
relevant to you,” said Camplejohn.
LinkedIn has
simplified its admin experience and “made it much easier to do tasks from
assigning users to managing groups.” LinkedIn also unified its
administration module across Sales Navigator, LinkedIn Learning, and LinkedIn
Recruiter.
Advanced
Searching was added to the Sales Navigator mobile app, bringing it to list
building parity with the desktop application. Earlier this year, LinkedIn
enhanced its company and lead profiles, also bringing them to parity with the
desktop application.
“LinkedIn’s recent updates to its Sales Navigator management tool makes it a more robust platform for sales teams. More importantly, the moves to bring more of its desktop features to the mobile app are evidence that LinkedIn finally understands how crucial a mobile experience is when designing a sales tool focused on lead management.”
Amy Gesenhues, MarTech Today
PointDrive,
Sales Navigator’s multi-media sharing application, will begin writing activity
history back to Microsoft Dynamics. Salesforce PointDrive sync will come
in 2019. PointDrive presents documents and video to end users as a
landing page and tracks views and shares.
“Now when
you send that pricing proposal to a prospect in PointDrive and members of the
buying committee engage with it, you’ll be able to see that activity in both
Sales Navigator and your CRM,” blogged Camplejohn.
LinkedIn continues
to expand its SNAP
partnerships, adding Zoom as their first
web conferencing partner. Users can now hover over an attendee name and
view Sales Navigator intelligence including their profile photo, title, and
common connections.
The Zoom LinkedIn SNAP integration provides meeting attendee insights and connections from within Zoom.
Four vendors
launched v2 SNAP integrations which provide broader access to Sales Navigator
actions:
In the
Salesforce Winter Lightning release, admins will be able to configure Sales
Navigator and add support for Person accounts without having to go to the
AppExchange.
This year, Sales Navigator focused on improved functionality and display for accounts, leads, and list building in their mobile and desktop applications; SNAP integrations; GDPR compliance and security; CRM opportunity management and buyers circles; alerting; employment analytics; and PointDrive CRM integration. Details on earlier releases are available in my blog: Q1, Q2, Q3.
