It’s like X-ray vision into the sales division’s actual phone conversations.
After losing his job during the great recession, Chris Orlob’s dad got a job as an inside sales rep. This job entailed selling over the phone. The first three months, he made no money. The following year he made $104,000. Orlob credits this dramatic increase to a single practice: every day Orlob’s father and his father’s manager would review call recordings to determine how to improve. “I’ve seen what it can do to transform sales,” Orlob says.
That testimony of the power of call reviews led Orlob to create Conversature. “Conversature is a conversation insights technology platform for sales teams,” Orlob explains. “It’s like X-ray vision into the sales division’s actual phone conversations.”
Conversature transcribes calls from speech to text and helps managers identify which sales behaviors are leading to revenue and closing. “Conversature is about bringing data science to figuring out what actually does work on a sales call,” Orlob says. “Conversature takes the guesswork out of closing deals.” It does this by analyzing call data. For instance, turns out calls are more successful if a sales rep asks, “Did I catch you at a decent time?” instead of “Did I catch you at a good time?” Who knew?
Orlob and his cofounder Britton Broderick began working full time on Conversature around thirteen months ago. Conversature is currently in Beta period and plans to go public in 2017. Current beta clients report improvement in closing rates, reduced onboarding time, and all around higher levels of sales rep performance.
Conversature is filling the black box that is currently sales conversation insight. “Our main goal is to design a new category from the ground up,” Orlob says. “We want to make something that’s different entirely and creates an industry itself.” Orlob and Broderick also want to ring the gong on Wall Street in 10 years when Conversature IPOs. We’ll do a followup story when that happens.
