I’m extremely excited to announce the availability of Avoma for a larger audience and at the same time also announce our partnership with Outreach.io, a leading sales engagement platform.
Since I’m talking about Avoma for the first time, let’s first understand what it truly is, and then we can dive into our partnership with Outreach.io.
The genesis
Ever since I started working in a B2B Enterprise space as a product management leader, I had many opportunities to launch new products from scratch and bring them to market. In all those instances, I would have to first sell a vision to a potential customer, build a minimum viable product, deploy it to a customer, and then continue to monitor the usage and optimize it for the success.
I would be involved in every single aspect of the customer relationship — Sales, Onboarding, and Customer Success. Back then, I didn’t know these different functions existed and I would simply do everything from start to end. It used to be a lot of stressful work, but I enjoyed doing it.
But as most B2B organizations are set up, there are specialized people to manage different customer relationships. Once I deployed a new product to the first customer and the product had been proven, my responsibility was to then hand it over to these specialized teams, train them, and let them sell future deals.
And that’s when I started to learn the gaps that existed in managing these different customer relationships.
B2B organizations have optimized their selling process by defining a set of different specialized roles, but that leads to a broken experience for new customers.
Let’s just understand a typical B2B organization’s roles and brief responsibilities (and I’m sure this is not an exhaustive list by any means) —
- Business Development Reps (BDR) — responsible for reaching out to cold leads and generating prospects
- Sales Development Reps (SDR) — responsible for reaching out to warm (inbound) leads and generating qualified prospects
- Account Executives (AE) — responsible for doing demos, negotiating a contract and closing a deal
- Sales Engineer (SE) — responsible for complex technical integration discussions/demos
- Implementation Manager (IM) — responsible for implementing and deploying a solution to a customer
- Customer Success Manager (CSM) — responsible for nurturing ongoing customer relationships, updating them on performance, and optimizing success
- Account Manager (AM) — responsible for identifying upsell and growth opportunities in existing customers
As you can see, most of the B2B organizations do multiple handoff in the interest of optimizing their own efficiencies to serve a customer through its entire lifecycle.
However the customer has to experience too many team members to work with, too many handoffs, resulting in too much lost context and too much information shared repetitively.
If a B2B organization wants to provide a seamless and delightful experience to their customers, then it’s a responsibility of every single customer facing team member to diligently manage every interaction, thoroughly capture customer information and their business needs, promptly follow up on action items, accurately relay pertinent information to cross-functional teams, and genuinely listen to customer’s needs and make them successful.
And that’s a lot of responsibility to expect from every customer facing team member to do it with the same level of discipline and quality for every customer on an ongoing basis.
Introducing Avoma.com
That’s when Avoma was born and came to rescue.
First of all, if you’re wondering what the heck Avoma means — it’s an acronym for — “A Very Organized Meeting Assistant”. We had to get creative to get a short and sweet .com domain name :).
Avoma is an intelligent meeting assistant for your customer-facing teams — like Sales, Implementation, Customer Success, etc.
It integrates with your existing workflow and captures all your customer conversations, transcribes them into text, identifies who said what, and also extracts key insights like next steps, questions asked, important keywords discussed, etc.
And all of this information is easily searchable for any team member in the organization at any time in future, and Avoma updates this information into the CRM system for timely data entry.
We believe that managing customer relationship should be the number one focus of customer-facing teams and they should offload all secondary tasks like capturing key details, updating CRM, sharing information, etc. to somebody else — either a human assistant or an AI-powered assistant or a hybrid of both.
Our partnership with Outreach.io
And that brings us to the second part of this post — our partnership with Outreach.io.
Outreach.io is a leading sales engagement platform that helps companies streamline everything from initial customer outreach to follow up, tracking conversations, and understanding analytics.
Earlier this year Outreach.io set out to evolve its product offering to focus on the next layer — customer engagement. Like us, Outreach saw the need to bring more value and genuine interactions back to all customer-facing conversations. It became bigger than just serving the sales team. It became about serving the customer.
As part of our partnership, Outreach.io Voice customers can integrate a dedicated Avoma Intelligence tile directly into their Outreach dashboard to bring more science to the art of customer conversations and boost their close rates and delight their customers.
For every Prospect and Account, they can get more insights as seen below —
- See all previously recorded conversations with that Prospect or Account
- Quickly play the recordings right there
- Understand who spoke when and for how long
- View a full transcript in Avoma’s website
New features and functionality will be introduced over time, including:
- Display next steps and keywords extracted from the conversation
- Adding and assigning next steps as a “Task” directly within the Outreach platform
We’re excited to work with Outreach.io to expand on their customer engagement platform and bring Avoma to more enterprises. Avoma and Outreach.io align with their mission to change the way salespeople and companies engage with their customers.
Together our hope is that buttoned-up client communications lead to faster closings, increased revenue, and higher quality of experience for customers and employees.
You can read more about the announcement on Outreach.io’s blog: https://www.outreach.io/blog/new-voice.
A no-brainer offer you can’t resist
In support of the new Outreach Voice launch, we’re excited to announce a limited time offer for all Outreach customers who want to bring more science to the art of their customer conversations.
Avoma will offer an integration for Outreach Voice call recordings free of charge for 12 months. This offer is for new Avoma customers who sign up before October 31, 2018.
Contact your Outreach customer success manager or contact our sales team directly at sales@avoma.com to get Avoma’s intelligence tile in your Outreach.io dashboard today!
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