Chorus.ai Helps Guru’s Bi-Coastal Revenue Team Stay in Sync

Guru simplifies knowledge-sharing for customer support, customer success, sales, and other revenue functions, so they can, in turn, have great customer conversations. Guru’s AI-powered Revenue Empowerment Network unifies the collective knowledge that lives in many different places in an organization, such as wikis and spreadsheets, and regularly verifies the accuracy of that information. Guru then delivers the right knowledge to revenue teams in real-time, without the need for those workers to open another application or browser window, or even search for information.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based Guru, founded in 2013 by enterprise software veterans Rick Nucci and Mitchell Stewart, has been growing rapidly. In 2018, the company was named one of Forbes’ 20 rising stars in cloud computing. It also opened a San Francisco office to build out its West Coast go-to-market presence and better serve an expanding roster of clients that includes hundreds of leading modern enterprises, like Spotify and BuzzFeed. It also recently secured $25 million in Series B funding.

Guru’s sales and marketing teams, which include several sub-teams such as product marketing and sales empowerment, have been growing fast. The sales team alone tripled in size in just 11 months in 2018 — and onboarding new reps as quickly as possible is a business imperative. And now that Guru is operating on two coasts, it’s a challenge for sales and marketing to collaborate effectively and maintain alignment.

Providing More Personalized Coaching to Reps — and Accelerating Ramp Times #

A key reason Guru implemented the Chorus.ai conversation intelligence platform was to help sales and marketing leaders reduce the time and effort required to onboard sales reps and coach existing team members. “Our old on-boarding process was self-paced and demanded a lot of content and shadowing,” says Halid Ibrahimovic, Senior Director of Sales at Guru. “With Chorus.ai, we’ve cut our ramp times in half. It used to take eight weeks to fully onboard sales reps. Now, we can do it in about four weeks.”

“Before we started using Chorus.ai, the onboarding process for sales was painful for marketing as well,” says Sunny Manivannan, Vice President of Marketing at Guru. “We had to build slide decks and spend a lot of time explaining to reps how they should talk about Guru. Now, with Chorus.ai clips, they can listen to call playlists and actually hear the voice of the customer. Chorus.ai has really improved the learning cadence for new reps.”

Ibrahimovic says Chorus.ai has helped him become a more effective coach for his team. Before Chrous.ai, he had to sit in on almost every sales call to understand how reps were talking about Guru with customers. But he now uses data insights from the platform to easily identify what top performers on his team do differently — and determine which reps could benefit from more coaching. “I have so much visibility across my team because of Chorus.ai,” says Ibrahimovic. “I can dive into a conversation at any moment, and that helps me to be a better coach. Chorus.ai allows me to create an almost immediate feedback loop with my team members. I feel like I’m riding right alongside them.”

Gaining Real-Time Insight into How Collateral for Sales Teams Performs “in the Wild” #

Having a strong connection between sales empowerment (the name Guru uses for sales enablement) and product marketing is critical to Guru’s business success. And these critical revenue-generation teams are finding that Chorus.ai helps them to stay in sync. “One of the marketing team’s philosophies is, ‘We win when sales wins,’” says Manivannan. “When we have a good connection with sales, it helps us learn faster and become a much better revenue team overall.”

Before Guru started using the Chorus.ai conversation cloud, Manivannan says the marketing team was essentially “throwing collateral over the fence” and hoping sales would understand how to use it effectively. Often, marketing would wait weeks for the sales team to send feedback about what assets and messages were resonating best with prospects and customers. “We also weren’t following through to make sure that the collateral was being used in the right way,” says Manivannan.

Chorus.ai now plays a big role in helping the product marketing team at Guru understand right away what collateral is working well in the field — or not. “Chorus.ai helps us ensure that when we release new collateral, we can see in real-time how it’s used ‘in the wild’ under real-world conditions. We didn’t have that visibility before,” Manivannan says.

Recording sales calls with Chorus.ai also provides Guru’s sales and marketing teams with insight into the questions that prospects have about Guru’s platform, their objections about pricing, and their views on the company’s competitors. “We can immediately share snippets of our sales conversations with the product marketing team so that they can help us to refine our sales strategy,” says Ibrahimovic. “Chorus.ai helps us maintain a nice dialogue with product marketing.”