We suppose you are here because you are evaluating Zoom IQ for Sales and Avoma. Given that you are here, I assume either you are leading or managing a sales team, or you are managing revenue operations or sales enablement responsibilities at a fast-growing B2B organization.
First of all, you are already doing the right thing by looking for a solution that will help your sales team's improve their performance.
It's probably time to get a platform that will help you make the most of the meetings across your teams and ensure you don’t let any deal slip through the cracks.
If you are wondering which one should you buy, or seeking an in depth and objective comparison between Zoom IQ and Avoma—don't worry. You're not alone. We have written this article to help you get answers to your questions and get clarity to decide which tool is the best fit for your needs. Alright, let’s go!
What entitles us to compare the two conversation intelligence platforms? Are we doing this because Avoma is a conversation intelligence tool? How to trust us for an objective/unbiased perspective?
Great questions! Very valid ones too!
In fact, Zoom Ventures is one of the investors in Avoma. And, we never write any content with the intent of one-upping on our competition.
We at Avoma have a clear PoV on our approach to conversation intelligence and revenue intelligence, we have always strongly believed in being useful and helpful to the SaaS community with our Modern SaaS initiative.
We’ve been in this space for a few years, and therefore through this blog we aim to share what we’ve learned and observed from our customers evaluating Avoma, as well as hearing from the evaluators and customers of Zoom IQ as well.
Here’s the five-step process on how we arrive at our comparative information in an unbiased manner:
There are features and product aspects similar and different between Zoom IQ and Avoma (which we get to further down this page if you're interested). However, the biggest difference is in the who and why. Another key difference is the scope of what Avoma and Zoom IQ solve for.
Zoom began as and remains best-known for its web conferencing platform, which later launched its own conversation intelligence tool for sales—Zoom IQ for Sales.
That’s great progress, and logical too, in terms of offering an all-in-one solution for its customers but its conversation intelligence offering is limited to a) the sales audience b) those who use Zoom meetings and Zoom Phone.
Takeaway: We all know how powerful the Zoom ecosystem is. If you are looking for a lightweight conversation intelligence tool for your sales team, and if your sales team doesn’t use other web conference tools or dialers like GoogleMeet, Aircall, Outreach, then Zoom IQ is a great fit as part of the Zoom One bundle.
Avoma has been intentional about building an all-in-one meeting lifecycle assistant from day one. While Avoma offers conversation intelligence and revenue intelligence, it doesn’t stop with insights but rather automates and enables the entire meeting workflow.
Avoma calls itself a meeting lifecycle assistant because every meeting has a lifecycle—a set of things you do before, during. and after the meetings so that you make the most of the time spent in meetings.
Takeaway: Objectively comparing the two conversation intelligence platforms—if you need basics of conversation intelligence (CI) on budget, Zoom IQ is a good starting point. But if you are looking for advanced CI which is purpose-built, then you might want to go for Avoma.
While at the outset it might seem like Avoma and Zoom are competing in the conversation intelligence space, both co-exist as well. In July 2021, Zoom launched its apps marketplace hosting 1400 third-party integrations including key players in the conversation intelligence space.
As part of this collaboration, Avoma built an Avoma Assistant for Zoom Meetings. It meant you could simplify the preparation of meetings, automate the note-taking, streamline the knowledge sharing, and make data-driven decisions based on insights derived by AI—right within your Zoom client experience.
Zoom is well aware of what they bring to the table by offering their own conversation intelligence (CI) plan as part of their Zoom One bundle. And yet, they also collaborate with the key CI players letting customers choose what’s best for them.
To help you decide what your must-haves and good-to-haves are, let’s look at a quick overview of what Conversation Intelligence and Revenue Intelligence softwares really mean.
A conversation intelligence software typically records, transcribes, and analyzes customer and prospect conversations. The software allows sales reps, account managers, and customer success managers to gain deeper visibility into their conversations and learn how to improve those conversations.
The foundation of these softwares is to record calls and meetings and use artificial intelligence (AI), convert speech into text, and then do more advanced analysis on the raw test. Thus by default, all products featured in this category include call recording and transcription capabilities.
But since email is a key channel for sales conversations, these platforms also analyze email content these days.
Using natural language processing (NLP), these platforms analyze conversations to identify topics discussed, talk patterns, questions asked, customer objections, sentiment, and more.
Using these insights, sales leaders can:
Revenue Intelligence software is an evolution of the Conversation Intelligence movement. With Revenue Intelligence, the scope isn't just limited to analyzing sales and customer conversations but spans across capturing and analyzing marketing activities.
Most B2B organizations face a common pain point—lack of alignment between marketing, sales, and customer success teams. Furthermore, the misalignment typically extends to a lack of seamless integration between the tools used by marketing, sales, and success tools, thus impacting end-to-end visibility.
Revenue Intelligence software solves this problem by automatically collecting and analyzing data across all your customer-facing teams and making it accessible with actionable insights to other teams. This approach empowers all revenue teams to collaborate and strategize faster on revenue growth initiatives.
Let's look at what data and activities Revenue Intelligence softwares need to track across different teams and what actionable insights it needs to provide to different teams:
Marketing
Sales
Success
Marketing
Sales
Success
Having understood what Conversation Intelligence software and Revenue Intelligence software are, let's now get to comparing Zoom IQ and Avoma. Zoom is a leader in the web conferencing category, but in this context, it would be relevant to say that Zoom IQ doesn't feature on the G2 grid for the conversation intelligence category. Avoma features in the leader quadrant.
Given the SaaS fatigue in today’s environment, it’s often confusing how to choose between two all-in-one platforms that have both similar as well as different flavors and focus areas.
That’s why we’re here to help. But before pulling the trigger to choose between two, let’s first understand how to evaluate these tools.
This is arguably one of the most important aspects of the solution as it will make or break adoption of the platform among your organization.
Questions to consider:
This is probably the second most important aspect of evaluating the solution, to check if they offer comprehensive and comparable functionality.
Questions to consider:
This is not the most important aspect of making a purchase decision, but everyone wants to buy an affordable all-in-one solution, that also is the best of breed in key functional aspects. And this becomes difficult when both vendors have different core strengths despite their publicly available pricing information.
Questions to consider:
While today a specific solution might serve your current needs for sales coaching and onboarding, have you considered how this solution will fit in for your future needs.
Questions to consider:
That said, let's now look at Zoom IQ and Avoma specifically.
Zoom IQ positions itself as a Conversational Intelligence platform for Sales focusing on closing deals faster, providing actionable feedback in terms of sales coaching and helping leaders in their forecasting.
Avoma on the other hand definitely helps sales with conversation and revenue intelligence. In addition to it, Avoma also helps you schedule meetings, automates note-taking using AI and syncs them to the CRM, and a lot more facilitating end-to-end meeting workflows. Lastly, Avoma is for both revenue and other teams (sales, CS, recruitment, marketing, product, and more).
In terms of the market, both the tools are appreciated by their customers and are also known for the SMB and mid-market presence.
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Both Zoom IQ and Avoma are rated highly by their users for their ease of use by their respective customers. In the case of Zoom IQ, the UX feels like a natural extension of the Zoom interface you’re used to.
Simplicity is at the heart of Avoma’s user experience. No complex set ups or downloads needed and literally no learning curve in terms of using the platform.
It primarily takes the angle of enhancing sales IQ with conversational AI. The platform is primarily for sales teams—by giving them meaningful and actionable insights from their customer interactions to improve seller performance.
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.
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.
-Theresa Larkin, UCaaS Product Marketing Manager, Zoom
Zoom IQ integrates with:
Calendars: Google Calendar, Office 365 and Exchange
CRMs: Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365
Web conference and Dialers: Zoom and Zoom Phone
From a deal intelligence perspective, Zoom’s AI offers a set of sentiment and engagement scores to assess deal risk. For instance, the deal analytics include the number of conversations per deal, duration of those conversations, time spent in each deal stage, which negotiators made the final purchasing decision, and more.
For collaboration, Zoom IQ offers a video snippets library where you can curate best practices on how to handle specific objections, present the value of various products, or position across target verticals.
Now, if you compare Zoom IQ with Avoma—Avoma offers call recording, conversation intelligence as well as deal intelligence (revenue intelligence). In fact, those are table stakes.
That said, Avoma is a more comprehensive conversation intelligence platform that takes a holistic approach across the meeting lifecycle stages.
Avoma positions itself as a meeting lifecycle assistant—a platform that helps you manage the entire meeting lifecycle—from scheduling meetings, preparing for your meetings, to automatically taking notes during the meetings, to getting actionable conversation and revenue intelligence from conversations across the board.
Avoma’s usage is not limited to sales. Though revenue teams like sales and customer success typically tend to be the first to adopt Avoma in customer organizations, it has use cases across functions such as product, marketing, recruiting, and more.
The reason Avoma takes this approach is—the more applications we use across the stages of the meeting lifecycle, the more we lose context while switching between apps, and we end becoming more siloed and end up manually stitching together the insights from various tools.
Avoma offers a single solution for all your meeting requirements across the organization. It not only makes your meetings smarter and actionable but also helps you break workplace silos because the platform optimizes for individual and team needs.
Key components of a meeting lifecycle assistant:
And here’s an overview of the tools under each of the components:
While Avoma comprehensively facilitates the entire lifecycle from scheduling meetings to giving you revenue insights, what makes Avoma unique compared to any other conversation intelligence solution are:
Let's say you have five sales reps on your team who make 50 calls each per day. And you want to have a quick understanding of what happened on each of those calls.
As much, one might want to think that they would listen to all the recorded calls, it's not practical. And it doesn't make sense to go through the transcriptions of the calls.
That's where notes help. Notes are typically a quick one-pager description of what was discussed on a given call. If you look at Avoma's screenshot below, the left section is a good example of how notes look like.
These are automated notes powered by AI, which also get appended to your CRM. And interestingly, the note-taking software also recognizes the need for reps to take manual notes at times and hence augments any notes taken by you to the AI-assisted notes.
If you are taking any notes manually or on other note-taking platforms like Evernote, you need to manually update it on the CRM. Therefore, if your notes aren't in a collaborative workspace, chances are that the notes and insights you gathered can easily be lost or siloed.
Zoom’s pricing page doesn’t seem to align with its “ease of use” mantra. For example, when you select the Zoom One bundle, though their pricing page looks simple, it’s quite tricky to understand what’s included in each plan at depth.
For instance, though their website talks about Conversation Intelligence as part of Zoom One, a deeper look into their pricing plan comparison would tell you that it’s not part of any of the Zoom One plans, and you’ve to purchase it as an add-on.
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Avoma’s pricing is designed for the entire organization and yet optimized for individual needs. The pricing plans try to strike a balance between giving clarity on what’s available in each plan, and allowing you the flexibility to pick and choose what’s best for your needs.
For example, with Avoma—if your sales and customer success teams want to leverage only the note taking and CRM appending capabilities—you could do that. Similarly, if you want access to conversation intelligence and not deal intelligence (revenue intelligence), you could do that too.
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Zoom IQ for Sales, as the name suggests, is primarily for sales. It’s a great fit if you’re already in the Zoom ecosystem using their web conferencing, Zoom Phone, and other cloud solutions.
But what if your sales team is using multiple conferencing tools like Google Meets or MS Teams? Or what if your SDR team is using other dialers like Aircall, Outreach, or Salesloft?
And what if other functions such as Product, Marketing, or Recruiting teams want to leverage the platform to record, transcribe and get insights for their meetings?
Zoom IQ is currently not catering to other functions beyond sales. And even if you wanted to use it for other use cases, its pricing model plus its limited integrations with Zoom ecosystem doesn’t offer enough flexibility for that.
And if you are in the phase, where you want to encourage cross functional collaboration, then you might want to leverage the power of Avoma.
Both Zoom IQ and Avoma are great tools. So, which one should you choose?
Hope you found this blog post useful!
