It's time to accelerate. Hey friends, this is Andy. Welcome to episode 740 of Accelerate, the sales podcast of record. Hey, I have another excellent episode lined up for you today. Joining me as my guest on this week's show is Craig Walker. Craig is the co-founder and CEO of Dialpad. Now today, our primary topic we're talking about is technology sales technology. In particular, there's been a tremendous number of new sales tech solutions hit the market over the past few years, and the question has been, and still is to some degree, is it actually helping sales? And by helping, I mean not just as we can make more dials or send more emails, but are we using this great sales technology to actually close more deals, improve our win rates, boost our true sales productivity? And if we aren't getting the full benefit of these tools, how could we use them better? So that's what we're going to be talking about. Make sure you stick around for that. But before you get into that, let me talk to you for just a second about VanillaSoft. VanillaSoft is the industry's leading sales engagement platform, but mostly people refer to it as the solution. It's the solution to ensure sales development reps make the right number of attempts for every lead. It's the solution to ensure sales development reps use more than just email, that they consistently use LinkedIn and that dreaded telephone as part of their sales playbook. It's the solution to serve the sales development rep the next best lead over and over again so they hit their activity numbers. So the solution starts with the right sales cadence, and that's why I need to check out VanillaSoft's guide titled 'Sales Cadences: What Works, What Doesn't, and Why You're Frustrated.' Again, that's 'Sales Cadences: What Works, What Doesn't, and Why You're Frustrated,' and you can get your free copy now at VanillaSoft.net/AndyPaul. That is VanillaSoft.net/AndyPaul.
Pretty just cool. It's perfect running weather actually, so yeah, nice. Yeah. So for people who maybe aren't familiar with Dialpad, may take a moment to explain what Dialpad does.
Yeah, sure thing. So me and my co-founders used to run the Google Voice product. So this was like 2008, 2009, 2010, and we started seeing more and more businesses moving to the cloud for Google G Suite in their email and documents and calendar and all that stuff. And we realized once your company moves to the cloud for basically its productivity suite, the idea of having a phone system or communication system that's built around your desk and built around a desk phone made no sense at all. So back then it was a little bit of a gamble whether CIOs would ever trust the cloud for their critical voice conversations, but we bet that they would, and it just gives you so many more benefits. So we left the company, left Google, started this company in 2011. And so what we do is basically the entire enterprise voice product suite. So we have a conferencing system called UberConference. We have a phone system...
I'm a subscriber too, yes.
It's got millions of users on there. There's something nice about just having a simple way to hop on a call, not have to enter pins and not have to do a whole bunch of nonsense to get going. We do that. Then we do Dialpad Talk, which is our phone system replacement that uses your mobile phone and your laptop and your computer much more than being built around a desk phone. And then we have two call center products called Dialpad Sell and Dialpad Support. And so kind of same thing, uses software versus desk phones and really allows you to be as modern and flexible and mobile-friendly as humanly possible. And then the last thing is we acquired an artificial intelligence company that now can convert all those conversations into text instantly. And from those texts, for an end user, you don't have to take notes, you can focus on the conversation. And for the company, you can start doing things like popping up the right answer if someone asks a question, or how do you handle this objection in a sales context, or if you have a BDR on the phone and someone mentions your competitor, what's the battle card against that particular competitor. So it's really adding a lot more capabilities to a phone call rather than just connecting two people.
Yeah, well, I want to definitely dig into that a little bit more as we go through the conversation. So I think a lot of companies are still sort of trying to figure out this whole unified communications as a service platform idea. I mean, maybe I know one of your competitors just entered into a big deal with Avaya, which seems like it adds a lot of validation to the whole segment.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's kind of a no-brainer that every single company's going to move to the cloud for their communications. Like the idea of managing big giant phone systems and doing your own patches and updates and wiring and things like that just makes no sense. And it really is like when you look at the UCaaS space, most of our competitors were built trying to replicate exactly what Avaya or Cisco did, a switch basically, just serve it from the cloud. Whereas we wanted to look at it as, hey, we think the way people work is changing and it's much more fluid and much more mobile and much more dynamic that we don't just want to give you a subscription version of Cisco or Avaya, we actually want to make something different, unique, and more compelling. So I think that's probably our biggest difference.
But yeah, so how, what does that feel like to the user then, that's the difference? I mean, you're small business, medium-sized business saying, okay...
Yeah, the nice thing about, I'd say the biggest difference is you're using your own cell phone and you're using your own laptop or computer as your phone rather than having a thousand-dollar piece of Cisco hardware on your desk with a bunch of buttons that you're trying to figure out how to use. So it really is, the nice thing about having it in software versus hardware is we can push updates or new features every week or so and you just automatically get them versus always been the problem with hardware, you can only put like a new patch once or twice a year and it's a big deal to get it in there. Whereas software as a service, it just kind of continues to keep getting better and giving you more functionality. So just a little more modern and it's just a recognition that people are working from anywhere at any time. For you and me, from home the day after Thanksgiving, and being freed from sitting in front of a phone on your desk is kind of like that liberating piece.
Yeah, I was, that's, I remember the last time I had a phone on my desk anyway.
Yeah, exactly. But the crazy thing is if you look at the market though, there's like 500 million business desk phones and only about 10 million of those have moved to the cloud. So there's still this massive, massive market that's coming.
Oh yeah, no, absolutely. Well, that's the thing, that's why I'm so fascinated about the pace of technological change. You know, we think there's this huge uptake, but I worked on Apple in the early days and people said, oh, it's only going to be a few years till everybody has a PC. Well, it turned out to be 15, 20 years before that number hit like 75% or something. I mean, it took longer. Same thing with broadband even in the home, I mean, it took longer than people anticipated it would.
Yeah, well, particularly when you have enterprises and CIOs who've been in these jobs for decades, right? Like the idea of ripping something else out that makes them really, really comfortable to put it all into the cloud is going to take a while. And like you look at giant things like large financial institutions or the federal government, like those are a ton of seats and it's going to be a long time before they're aggressive enough to move all that stuff to the cloud. So you have this long tail of laggards basically.
Yeah, though the government's just in the process of awarding that what, $50 billion JEDI cloud contract. Somebody, yeah, still TBD I presume. Dialpad is part of that at some point, I wonder?
I don't think so. At some point in the future it should be, but I don't think it is part of that one.
Interesting. What about, so what about mission-critical applications like trading desks and so on? Do they still need to have dedicated lines or can they...?
I mean, at the end of the day, if you believe that networks and connectivity improves every single year, there's going to be a point where the benefits of moving even that to the cloud outweighs the risk of, oh my God, what happens if the cloud goes down. You know, the cloud is now about 10 years old, it's getting more and more reliable every single day. Like you remember in like three, four, five years ago you used to see there would be like an Amazon outage and all these websites would be down for a day. It's been a long time since you've, knock on wood, it's been a long time since you've heard of one of those things happening. And I think as the cloud providers realize that they're getting more and more mission-critical apps running on their clouds, they've done a lot in the back end to make sure that they have the redundancy and reliability to make sure that it continues working. So at some point, yes, like the trading desk or even hospitals and emergency responders should all be cloud-based.
Yeah, well, I just thinking in terms of traders without getting off the point too much, as you know, they've now got these program, not now, but they've developed, the quants developed these program trading regimens that are based on receiving information fractions of a second faster than other people and arbitraging on the difference. So yeah, I think those, whatever gets those as fast as humanly possible, they're going to do. Yeah, but as far as like hopping on a phone call and taking a trade order from a customer, yeah, no doubt that'll ultimately get to the cloud.
Yeah, maybe there, as far as I know. So let's talk about Dialpad Sell. You had talked about that.
Yeah, is it purely a call center or is it also for sales teams itself?
Yeah, it's both. So think of it as an inbound sales line that can distribute to all your agents and you can have all these different routing rules of, you know, if they don't answer in a certain quick amount of time it goes to the next one, or the longest idle person, or you just have a fixed order. Like you can set it up however you want. You even had one customer set it up where they didn't want the BDRs to know where they were in the queue, so it was literally like random assignment until everyone's ready to grab the phone as soon as it comes in and then if you don't answer within 10 seconds you're out and it goes to the next guy. So it's a really powerful inbound one. And then for outbound calling, it can do auto-dialing or power dialing through a list that comes out of your Salesforce record. It'll show your local number, or like if you're dialing to local Plains, New York, it'll show the local presence. If you catch a voicemail system, it'll leave a voicemail message and get you on to the next call. So it's kind of like an inbound and an outbound.
Got it. So then you just also recently acquired TalkIQ. So let's walk through what that means for...
Yeah, so what you're talking about, the contextual help within a call. Exactly. So what we saw was every single phone or telephony provider is really focused on connecting the two endpoints and making that a really high-quality connection, which now feels like table stakes. Like, right, how do we add more to that? How do we make it better? So before we bought this artificial intelligence company, we'd do things like show you the LinkedIn profile of the person you're calling or the person who's calling you and give you some additional context outside of just the phone number coming in. But then when we bought this AI company, what they did, which was really fascinating, they were funded by Salesforce and some other top-tier VCs, they had the ability to, they optimized their engine for the phone call, which is interesting, like 8 kilohertz audio it was optimized for. And then secondly, they did the ASR where they converted into text in real time. So it's not just like the call ends and then it converts into text and then your manager can get some insights of, oh, you did a terrible job of objection handling here or you did a great job closing there. It can now, that happens in real time. If I'm the rep in front of my computer as we're having this conversation, if you were to ask me, you know, how are you guys different from RingCentral, bang, like it would pull up within half a second a battle card of how do we handle that question. Or if the guy's hemming and hawing and won't commit to a next meeting or a follow-up, it can coach you how to apply urgency, how to offer a discount, give you pricing, like basically anything you want to set up based off anything that the prospect or the customer says, you can actually customize for yourself.
So triggered by keywords?
Triggered by keywords, and then the AI or machine learning on top of that is that beyond keywords, there's probably a thousand ways to discuss, you know, what the pricing or timing or positive or negative sentiment, and that's where the AI machine learning actually comes into play where it's like, okay, this is what they're really saying here is they're interested in buying even though they don't come out and say it. So like figuring out those nuances and those patterns is really where the AI kicks in beyond just keywords.
Yeah, so I think this is a fascinating topic for me because you, I love technology, embrace technology, but also we have to be cognizant of what the potential impacts are to sellers, right? And so, you know, one of the problems we have in sales is widely acknowledged is we have this trend where sellers tend to be a little robotic, right? Because I've got my list of scripted questions I got to follow my list of scripted questions. And you know, if we're constantly feeding people information, are we A, sort of taking away their agency to some degree, and B, do they stop thinking altogether?
That's a, you know, I've probably discussed this a hundred times, I've never had that question before. I don't think so. I think at the end of the day, if I'm on a call and you and I are having a conversation and you ask me things and I'm well-trained and I know the answer, I'm just handling it. But I think where it helps is when you're in a situation where you don't know the answer or you may be a little flummoxed or you're going on and you've kind of lost your train of thought or you've lost something, like you can do all sorts of guide rails to kind of get you back into the flow of the conversation of, hey Craig, you're speaking at 145 words a minute, you know, this probably isn't optimal, slow down, take a breath. Just little things like that can make the experience so much better.
I like that. I mean, that to me is, that's something useful, right? Is, yeah, you're at 148, we know max is 150, people can really absorb, so yeah, take it down a bit, take a deep breath. Absolutely, buy that. Ask more open-ended questions. Like you can start seeing like the percentage of how much you're speaking versus the other person. There's a lot of things that still gives you all the agency and the creativity but just kind of keeps you within those guide rails. Yeah, I mean, we have the sort of larger issue in sales and some of it's being spurred by, you know, the conversational intelligence systems that are out there, you know, Gong, Chorus, you know, RingDNA, all everybody is that there are a couple of those companies in particular that talk quite a bit about what they think they're learning from the data that they collect, which I would contend aren't valid lessons, right? They can really be applied on a one-on-one basis. It's, you know, to me it's like, well, how, okay, how do we take this and really use it in a way that improves the individual within the context of the individual, as opposed to what I believe is happening is oftentimes the way it's being used today is, hey, here's the word that the top reps use at this point in the conversation that does this, and we're trying to make everybody be like the top rep, but they can't be. What we want them to be is the best version of themselves. Yeah. So how do we use the technology to accomplish that? Because I think that's true of sales technology in general. We're sort of in this Golden Age with our sales engagement platforms and so on and so forth, but if we look at sort of the external statistics reporting from like CSO Insights and the rest, it's, hey, we're actually getting worse at sales in B2B. Yeah. So it's sort of the irony that in the era, the Golden Age of sales technology, performance seems to be declining, which to me doesn't say the technology is not good, it says we don't know how to use it yet to make the improvements that we need.
