How to leverage AI to scale your sales coaching

Your sales reps forget about 50 percent of information they have just processed within the first 60 minutes. After 24 hours, that's up to 70 percent. 

This isn't just specific to sales reps. As humans, we’re all bad at remembering things. The diminishing recollection of learned information over time is known as “The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve,” named after late German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, who founded the experimental psychology of memory.

It may not be a big deal if your reps forget their Netflix password. However, if they forget a key product feature (especially when they have a buyer on a Zoom call), it could cost them the sale, wasting all the hours spent on scoring that critical customer meeting. When a prospect asks about your integrations or how you stack up against a competitor, your reps need the answers at their fingertips. If they have to follow up afterward, their sales cycles will slow and their close rates will drop.

Revenue leaders need to enable and scale their best coaches to improve reps’ ability to deliver a great customer experience. So how can you help all of your reps remember critical information on calls?

Fortunately, the solution doesn’t have to mean more coaching time from you after the fact. Outreach has developed a shortcut to scale sales coaching in real time, giving your reps the information they need, right when they need it.

Introducing Kaia: Your Reps’ New Zoom Virtual Assistant

Our Knowledge AI Assistant, or Kaia, surfaces the information your reps need on a Zoom call at exactly the moment they need it. It automatically attends sales calls to deliver your best verbiage about the product, pricing, and competition — scaling your guidance so you can coach and onboard sellers on calls with customers in real time, not after the fact.

How does it work? Great question.

Kaia “listens” for keywords that come up in the conversation. Based on those cues, it surfaces content cards, which are short summaries of relevant information. It’s the right content surfaced on cue — right at the very moment when your reps need it. It identifies important action items, lets you bookmark key moments, and facilitates capturing notes directly within the transcript.

Now, your reps are no longer expected to remember ALL the information they learned in sales training, which (based on research) was never possible in the first place.

Kaia has the perfect memory, and it surfaces the right information at the right time.

How Kaia Saves Time for Managers + Shortens the Sales Cycle

Outreach Sales Development Manager Kaitlen Kelly has 14 reps on her team, each of whom make an average of 50 touches per day. That’s 3,500 touches per business week.

“I can manually review 5 percent of those conversations — 10 percent if I’m lucky,” she says.

Sales managers don’t have time to analyze 100 percent of their reps’ communications and provide personalized feedback. And, even if they did, it would still be like a Monday morning quarterback. The outcome of the game has already been determined, and the opportunity to course correct has already been missed.

Instead of Kaitlen waiting until a sales call is over to give feedback and support, Kaia gets involved during the meeting to improve rep performance.

Our sales managers can now see what cues trigger Kaia most often, and use that data to refine our sales strategy. If they see a spike in a specific competitor, they know we have to act on it. It creates a full-circle feedback loop that drives constant improvement across our entire sales team.

Coaching at Scale with Content Cards

Kaia serves as the “digital ride-along manager” by detecting keywords based on voice cues, then displaying content cards for the sales rep with the right questions to ask or points to make. This allows sales managers to scale their coaching across the whole team.

To determine which content cards to roll out, Outreach’s enablement, product, and marketing teams collaborated to highlight the most common “sticking” points during onboarding and training.

We came up with three sets of content cards: competition, product, and partnerships.

Competitors

The sales engagement market is intensely competitive. We track around a dozen vendors as direct competitors — some good, some bad, some in between. We designed battlecards for each of them, detailing a handful of key differentiators.

Let’s say a prospect says they’re looking at Acme Corp. That competitor name triggers Kaia, and it fires up the competitor battlecard.

The rep can scan the battlecard and pick the best response. They might point out that Acme Corp was started by a marketing person, whereas we were founded by a product person. Or they might bring up our position on the Forrester Wave report. Or they could ignore it entirely. Our battlecards aren’t prescriptive. If a rep wants to take the conversation in a different direction, they can do that.

Products

Outreach launches brand-new features and products every month, like Buyer Sentiment, Insights, and, of course, Kaia.

For sales reps, there’s a ton to remember about each product. What is it? How do they position it? What are the benefits? How does it help their prospective customers?

When we’re gearing up to launch a new product or refresh an existing feature, we build a content card.

These content cards aren’t a replacement for product training. We still expect our reps to learn about every new product and feature, but Kaia allows us to reinforce that knowledge and fill in the gaps.

Partnerships

Modern sales tech stacks are enormous — and they’re only getting bigger. Outreach integrates with nearly 100 third-party applications. Drift, Terminus, and Intercom for chat. Dialpad, RingCentral, Orum, and Aircall for voice. You get the idea.

A large partner ecosystem means our products integrate with all of the other resources buyers need. It also means it’s impossible for reps to know how to talk about them all.

Kaia’s ability to recognize partner names and surface integration capabilities means reps are able to accurately answer questions on the spot. It also means that messaging is consistent across your sales team. This cuts down on research time after the fact or emailed questions to you, as their manager.

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You don’t have time to analyze 100 percent of your reps’ communications and provide personalized feedback. Want to learn how you can use Kaia to improve your coaching and empower your entire team? Check out our latest ebook, “How Real-Time Sales Enablement Enhances Zoom Calls With Buyers.”