VoiceOps launches to put insights in the hands of managers coaching sales reps

The enterprise voice space grows hotter today as VoiceOps announces its seed round led by Accel with participation from Founders Fund and Lowercase Capital. The YC-backed startup aims to support sales teams by offering managers clear insights into what tactics are being used on the front lines.

Founders, Daria Evdokimova, Ethan Barhydt and Nate Becker designed a machine learning-powered system that monitors calls made by enterprise sales teams. Using their own metrics for success, managers can then compare the performance of their sales reps on a dashboard. VoiceOps can surface the use of specific sales tactics like upsell attempts and time spent explaining the benefits of a given product or service.

Daria Evdokimova, CEO of VoiceOps

Evdokimova, CEO of VoiceOps, explained to me that many large sales teams, that operate transactionally, still have manual quality assurance teams listening to and flagging sales calls. It’s tough for managers, playing the role of blindfolded coaches, to provide actionable feedback to reps on the ground. This was the case with Weebly, one of the startup’s early customers.

“Weebly used to have a QA team that would just listen to calls 24/7 and manually fill out score cards,” Evdokimova said.

That kind of inefficiency is easily automatable with today’s automatic speech recognition and natural language processing. Enterprise tools like VoiceOps hold an advantage over assistants like Siri and Alexa because they’re designed for singular use cases. The creators of VoiceOps spent extra time fine tuning to increase accuracy for things like recognizing the sales vocabulary.

VoiceOps differentiates itself within the already crowded enterprise voice space by targeting PMs rather than individual sales users. Tools like Chorus.ai are designed to support individual members of a sales team. Chorus is optimized for transcribing calls, much like VoiceOps, but its sweet spot is flagging action items and sharing best practices. In contrast, VoiceOps helps managers understand exactly what’s happening on their team’s sales calls. The platform is a good checks and balances system to augment coaching.

An SEC Form D filed by VoiceOps in December 2016 under its old name, Clover Intelligence, indicates that it was in the process of raising a $2 million round, of which it had secured $1.975 million. The startup opted not to disclose its total fundraising so it’s not immediately clear what transpired in the months since.

Evdokimova says that VoiceOps intends to scale its own internal sales team over the next few months and that the company is prioritizing deployment.