Closing more sales is always the #1 goal of your business.

Sales has always been a challenging task with lead tracking, field visits, lead info collection and submission, data entry into CRM, sales calls, demos and targets. The pressure of converting qualified leads is high and handling various leads at different stages of sales cycle at the same time can get quite frustrating. Especially in the current scenario, getting on various sales calls all day and staying ahead of all potential customer requirements and queries while convincing them to close the deal has become a major stress point for all sales teams. It has thus become imperative to help solve the operational challenges faced by the sales teams worldwide, so they can focus on the bigger picture – Closing Deals. To explore this idea, Andy Steuer interviewed Shruti Kapoor, founder of Wingman, whose sole purpose is making sales easy and help boost inter team visibility.

Andy Steuer

Hey everybody, its Andy steuer here from write for me. And I’ve got Shruti Kapoor here from Wingman. And I want to talk a little bit about the amazing technology that I found recently. I always love interviewing CEOs and founders of companies who are building innovative products and services, and I wanted to introduce Shruti. So Truly pleasure to have you here.

Shruti Kapoor

Thanks, Andy. Great to be speaking with you. I’m really excited.

Andy Steuer

Yeah, tell me a little bit about Wingman. What does Wingman do and what is the problem that Wingman solves in the market?

Shruti Kapoor

Sure, you know the way I think about it is a Wingman for sales teams and especially in today’s world, a lot of times what people are struggling with is staying in sync without jumping on yet another Zoom call. And so that’s exactly what Wingman does. It provides complete visibility for all different sales interactions that are happening. And it also provides coaching and real-time feedback to the salesperson.

Andy Steuer

And how does Wingman work? Just for anybody that’s watching, how does it basically work?

Shruti Kapoor

Yeah, so, you know there are different pieces of information that we bring together. Right? So the first piece of information is what are the interactions that are happening with customers and a large part of it is all of the calls. So when there is a video conferencing meeting like this Wingman is joining every single sales meeting and the way it does that is it syncs with the sales reps calendar. It knows all of the meetings that are scheduled on that person’s calendar and then joins the meeting as an additional participant. It’s almost like a personal assistant or you know if you’d like a co-pilot or Wingman for the salesperson on that meeting. If people are doing these meetings through, you know, just simple phone calls that they might be making through diallers, it’s again getting information on what’s happening in those calls through the dialer APIs and of course, a lot of the context or any sales organization exists in the CRM. So it also syncs with the CRM. All right. So what’s happening is that it is recording all of these conversations in real-time, it’s analyzing it. It transcribes it and based on what appears on the call it gives feedback to the salesperson on what they could be saying or how they could say it. Alright, that was a really long monologue and at one point the Wingman warned me that I’ve been talking for too long. And that’s exactly what it would do for salespeople.

Andy Steuer

That’s really cool. Why don’t we jump into a quick demo here? And you can show us how Wingman works on the back end and what the interface looks like. I see that it’s joining us on the call here. I’ve recently become a Wingman customer myself. You’ve converted me successfully. And I love using Wingman in all my calls. And it’s sitting right here in Zoom. Listening to this conversation. And it’s transcribing it, Right?

Shruti Kapoor

Yeah, Yeah so. You can have a Zoom call or a Microsoft team call, it’s just seamlessly joining each of those and quickly telling people, you know, keeping them organized with notes and telling them also “Hey, this is what you could be doing better”. So let me share my screen. All right, and since there are two parts to this, maybe let me show some of the cool stuff. So do you see there’s a little widget on the top right of my screen? All right, which is just showing us that there’s a meeting going on between the two of us. And what this is doing, it’s listening to everything and recording it in real-time. So, the first thing is I don’t want to take notes. Maybe there’s something important in the meeting, I just click here, it creates a bookmark for that segment of the meeting. All right, and then like I said, it also gives me Behavior coaching. So I’m sure somewhere down the line, you’ll see a little pop-up which reminds me that I’ve been speaking for too long. But then the third thing it does is it gives me easy cues, right, so you mentioned, hey what do those do on a zoom meeting? All right. Now, because we integrate with so many different things, I might not remember what every integration looks like but just as I said zoom, this card popped up, right? And it could be really handy for a salesperson to know that, well you know, these are all of the important things that we do for this particular Integration, right. People could use this either for understanding or getting information in real-time or even a, you know, little reminders like I often say, “does that make sense?”. And I know that’s not a great question to end with, so I have a little reminder so when I use that it just you know kind of reminds me “Hey stop saying that”. So all of that, it’s doing in real-time by listening to what both of us are saying and the great thing is that once I turn off the demo mode and you know, the customers don’t get to see a demo mode. You don’t see any of the cue cards. All right, but, even if they’re popping up on my screen, they’re like my secret cheat sheet.

Andy Steuer

So a couple of things. So the bookmark feature is really interesting. I use that pretty frequently. And for me, the way I use it is we’re in the middle of a conversation. And we want to continue the natural flow of the conversation, but I want to make a little bookmark to remind myself when I go back to review the call that that’s an important part of the call to go back to. So it just puts a flag in the call. And the cue cards, I love the account battle cards there. It kind of a gamifies a little bit, what we’re all doing every day. And they’re great reminders to help, especially from a training perspective when you do sales training and you’ve got new salespeople on board. These are like handrails a little bit of support on their calls so that their message is consistent with the company’s message. So I find that really useful.

Shruti Kapoor

You know, one of the things that people struggle with when it comes to onboarding new sales reps faster is it’s not the product rating right? Like you can get people covered on the product training in a couple of days, but what’s really hard is that there are so many different objections that can come up or different types of questions that can come up right in real customer conversations. And it’s really hard for people to remember everything, you know, in one week or two weeks onboarding. So this kind of allows people to set their own pace right both in terms of saying okay, you know, they’re a quick reminder that I can set for myself or you know a team can set for me. But also that you know, if there is a topic that I think I still struggle with, I can go and look at other reps calls, right? So today I decided that you know, let me see how other reps handle questions around discounts. I don’t need to go and you know to speak to my manager or speak to someone else on the team. I can very easily just say, you know, go to Wingman and look at all the calls that people have talked about pricing. So let me actually take you in. Maybe that’s a good Segway.

Andy Steuer

When you just said the word discount my battle card popped up by the way funny. Okay, so we’re here in the Wingman app and tell us a little bit about what we’re looking at here.

Shruti Kapoor

Yeah, so let me actually start maybe with the dashboard. Alright, so the first thing that managers often like to do is just look at how the different reps are doing. So this provides them a quick glimpse both in terms of you know, their productivity. So are they making enough calls, are some people having much shorter calls and others right. And then in terms of their engagement, right? So are they able to engage the other person? All right. So like I have a “talk to listen” ratio of 46% you Know, Know, maybe that’s reasonable. Maybe the other people in my team have it much higher. And so maybe I need to coach them on that. All right. And also what is the longest monologue that I have had, you know, this is observed by a call that I was recording with myself, but then you can go in and set up, you know a variety of things that they might like to track. So you could look at how I track whether people are adhering to my script, you know are people asking qualification questions on every Discovery call, right? And what is the impact of locals showing up? How often is a competitor showing up in My call? All right. So all those types of things that are just really easy for managers to understand from Here, right? And then what we do is so as a manager I might come here. And I might decide that I’m curious to learn more about calls with blockers. All right, or I’m curious to just see all of my calls that have a pricing discussion. Right. So this is kind of a list of all of the calls across the team. Now, of course, what is really hard for anyone to do is you know, there are 2,000 calls here. You don’t know where to start.

Andy Steuer

Yes.

Shruti Kapoor

And so what people frequently resort to is just you know randomly sampling a call. Alright, so they might say Okay, you know what? This one looks interesting. Maybe it’s like 30 minutes, that’s roughly how long a demo should be so maybe this is just a call that I want to review.

Andy Steuer

Yeah

Shruti Kapoor

But that’s you know, that’s not really good if you’re trying to do coaching on a particular theme, right? Instead, what I might want to do is to say you know what I want to look at all of my calls where you know, I may be discussed pricing and maybe set up next steps. Right, so I can go in here. And I can give fairly Advanced filters. And I could also further say that you know, show me only calls out of this where the deal closed or didn’t close. This is also pulling in data from the CRM where I can say, you know, what shows me only closed deals or lost deals or whichever way.

Andy Steuer

And what CRMs do you integrate with while we’re on the topic?

Shruti Kapoor

Yeah, so we integrate with, of course, Salesforce. We also integrate with HubSpot, Pipedrive and a few others.

Andy Steuer

It’s great. So it pulls out all that information together. And it does that through the transcription of the calls and the AI detects certain keywords, like pricing for example, or other cues that help to create these filters. And you can create other filters on top of that, right?

Shruti Kapoor

Exactly. You can create your own filters on top of that. And then so let’s maybe look at one of the calls here. And of course the other great thing is that I can go in, and I can also search for calls based on, you know, a variety of things. I could search for calls just based on a particular word that’s setup or even set up alerts for it. Maybe I want to know every time somebody on my team uses a curse word in the call. So let’s very quickly look at a call. Sorry one second.

Shruti Kapoor

And so, you know, this is what reviewing the call looks like right. Now oftentimes teams face the challenge that when they are looking at a call, they don’t want to spend 30 minutes looking at the 30 minutes. So how do we make that process much faster for the use? All right, because that’s how you know that disconnect comes in. But there are managers like yeah, you know, even if I have the call recording, I don’t want to go back in and listen to it. Can you just give me an update? Right? So if you really want to ease the process you have to make sure that this experience is really seamless for anyone who wants to come and get insight from the call. You know a few different things that we do here. One is of course, the transcript is available, people can quickly search for things within the transcript. All right, so maybe I want to look for every time somebody talked about cue cards. So I can go in and type that. Here. I can also color-code all of the speakers. So I know when you know Neal was speaking and when Shruti was speaking. So that makes it much easier for me to visually see, you know, what parts of the conversation I want to listen to. Another good thing we talked about was bookmarks. All right so this is where they will show up. Right. So if during the call I clicked on this because I thought this was important. And you know, I wanted to refer back to this. Often the way people think about the call is I’m interested in knowing, did my rep ask the right questions. And I’m interested in knowing what questions the customer asked.

So the AI actually detects all of the questions on the call.

Shruti Kapoor

And you know who’s speaking when, so it’s super easy for you to know what you want to focus on.

Andy Steuer

That’s great. And it’s also really important to be able to build up this Library so that when you’re training other sales reps, you’ve got this Library as a go-to so that they can quickly get up to speed.

Shruti Kapoor

Absolutely. You don’t have to jump up searching for what content you should be creating. Yeah. And you know coming to your thing on creating that Library, if I saw that you know Neal asked me a question, and I thought that the scissors, I can just click here and start listening to the call.

The second is if I think that you know, the response by the rep was really great.

Shruti Kapoor

Maybe what I want to do is I want to actually start creating the library. Right here. Right. So I can actually create. I can comment and I can tag a few people to the comments. So I can see you know what I want all of my team to listen to. And I can tell them why I think that they should listen to this right great response to pricing.

Andy Steuer

And I imagine that sends them an email at that point to let them know with a link to the video.

Shruti Kapoor

Yeah, so it sends them an email or a Slack notification and what I can do is because I might have future Reps for whom I also want a sample of the call, I can also create hashtags and say training moments.

Andy Steuer

Great

Shruti Kapoor

And then I can easily create a playlist of all of the calls that I want people to listen to.

Andy Steuer

Very cool.

Shruti Kapoor

And yeah, So the other thing of course important is people to be able to do better follow-ups and to help people just look at tags that they might have created for themselves. So yeah, that’s kind of a lot of what the product does. And what we’ve seen is during the COVID situation, people have just started using the product like, you know, three to four times of what they were using in February because it’s just so important to keep in sync with the team, and also to quickly iterate the message right, like so much is changing around you. It’s hard to get, you know the feedback from salespeople constantly, you know what, this is what happened, this is how this messaging went, but it’s so much easier to do that here.

Andy Steuer

Yeah, I would imagine with COVID and you know so many people working from home now, that usage will go up, because it’s not necessarily only for salespeople. It could be for other calls, operational calls, for example, that you want to be able to train those people or save those moments so that you know, as we live in this distributed work environment. This is a great way to be able to share knowledge with one another and have that education that normally you walk into somebody’s office. And you can just quickly get them up to speed with something. This is a great way to be able to do that virtually. Are you seeing usage pick up from other parts of the organization? Maybe it starts with sales. But it goes to other parts of the organization?

Shruti Kapoor

Yeah, you’re right. We’ve also seen a lot more non-sales user gets added to the product right especially product and marketing because they are the other people who really need to know what customers are saying, and this is you know, like the quickest way for them to know that without taking up more time from the sales team.

Andy Steuer

That’s great. So I’m going to trigger a few hashtags here by asking you who are some of your competitors.

Shruti Kapoor

So maybe I should enable the demo so you can see the hashtag if that’s what you’re actually going through.

Andy Steuer

Yeah, let’s go for it.

Shruti Kapoor

Yeah, so, you know, one of our competitors, there’s a company called Chorus, Right? And again, I mean, I think Chorus, Gong, exact Vision like there are a bunch of players in that space, right? I think the way people have thought about this has been to say listen CRMs only have five percent of all of the information from the conversations. How do we make sure that we have a lot more available to managers? But I think that what’s been missing in that layer is to look at it from a sales rep point of view. Not just the sales manager’s point of view. Right? So I really like to think of this as a tool that is the Wingman for the team. All right, not just for the sales manager. And this is why you know things like allowing people to bookmark quickly means that it’s actually helping not just the sales manager but also the salesperson. Right? So so that’s. Yeah, That’s one of those.

Andy Steuer

And what happens when with the integration with CRM’s that you integrate with? Does the link to the call gets added to the person’s record? So you would be in my database for example, would our call here get appended to your record in my CRM.

Shruti Kapoor

Yeah, that’s an important question. So if you look at the call review page, others also have CRM information part here and what happens is if I click on this, it automatically updates the activity field in the CRM whether it is Hubspot or Salesforce or whichever else. So one of the things I do is it will go and populate the activity, so I don’t have to rely on the field sales rep to go and do that manually and say I had this call, you know, this is where more information can be found. You can also actually go in and take notes within Wingman that will show up in the CRM. So this for example is the following question. Right. So this is the call that we just saw on Wingman that’s been populated in Hubspot automatic.

Andy Steuer

The sales rep doesn’t have to do anything. It just shows up there because it recognizes their user ID there.

Shruti Kapoor

Yeah

Andy Steuer

What’s the unique identifier, their email address and the meeting invite or how does that connect?

Shruti Kapoor

Yeah, the unique identifier is the email ID, so what it’s doing is it’s picking the email ID from the calendar. And then it’s trying to see whether the same email ID exists in the CRM and if it does then it goes and updates it, if it’s a phone call with the unique identifier, it will pick the phone number.

Andy Steuer

Very cool. So helpful for salespeople who are oftentimes busy engaging in the call and a lot of this stuff can be manual Data input and oftentimes that gets missed. So having that automation is really helpful.

Shruti Kapoor

So the other thing that we’re bringing in is the ability to review the entire deal from within mail and so not just your phone calls, but also, you know all of the email communication and to be able to you know, share comments and feedback on that right from within Wingman so that you’re sharing a comment on specific parts of that interaction. You don’t have to go back and forth pasting links. Etc.

Andy Steuer

Yeah, that’s great and tell me a little bit about the history of the company. How did you get here?

Shruti Kapoor

So I actually spent a decade working in finance and started out with Morgan Stanley as an investment banker. And that was you know, right around the time the financial crisis hit So, you know the crisis was new to me, even though a lot of people around me haven’t been through a situation like this before. And then a couple of years back, maybe not a couple of years back anymore, but a few years back, I was working with a fintech company, you know, the progression from Finance to finance and investing and then FinTech. And I know I was an early employee bringing them to a new market and as part of the go-to-market strategy, it very quickly became a game around figuring out sales, hiring salespeople that were kind of my first brush with sales and what I quickly got interested and frustrated by was Salesforce, Right? I felt that you know while I wanted to rely on it, for a variety of data, it didn’t have that information. So that’s been you know how I started on this. And that’s been my journey. And I started this two years back with two other co-founders. They are both very talented Engineers. They spent more than a decade building some great tools. One of them was a founding member of Uber’s AI infrastructure team and what we wanted to do was you know, we decided we wanted to do something that was exciting and that would bring you know, of course, what we thought we could do better than others, right so it could bring technology and it would bring the sales part of it together.

Shruti Kapoor

And you know that the one thing that I realized was that sales is a really stressful profession. And I think that whatever you can do to make your sales person’s life better is probably worth doing.

Andy Steuer

I love that. I love how you know the history of where you came from and how you’ve arrived here and told me let’s talk a little bit about pricing. I think that people are a little curious. And I Know It triggered a little cue card there, but tell me a little bit about your pricing model.

Shruti Kapoor

So we, you know, charge salespersons recording calls. So we kind of think of it as a tool that we want the entire organization to use right but only after paying for the people who you know are recording calls and getting the most direct benefit from it. And the prices start at $500 per rep for the year and anybody else who’s on the platform like a product team or marketing team or managers, they all get a free license.

Andy Steuer

That’s great. It’s like a. It’s an offer you can’t refuse really if you’re going to get behind your sales team and invest in your sales team. That’s such a great way to do that Truly. Is there anything else that you think that we should have anybody who’s watching this hear more about you and the company?

Shruti Kapoor

I think if you feel that your sales team is, you know, feeling a little bit uncoordinated or a little bit low on morale, and you think that you would want to help them, you should definitely go and recommend this to them because we’ve just been getting so much love from people who’ve been using it because it’s really been a game-changer for remote teams in this tough time.

Andy Steuer

That’s fantastic and you can find Wingman @ trywingman.com. And I’m Andy Steuer from writeforme.io. And Truly, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Shruti Kapoor

Thanks, Andy.