How a sales leader uses KAIA to coach smarter and drive performance

In this episode of Outreach on Outreach, Senior Sales Leader Greg Baumann walks us through how he uses KAIA—Outreach’s conversational intelligence module—to stay on top of team performance, coach reps efficiently, and scale insights across the revenue org. From real-time call analysis to AI-powered coaching tools, KAIA helps leaders gain visibility and act fast without being in every room.

Welcome to another Outreach on Outreach. My name is Greg Baumann. I'm one of the Senior Sales Leaders here at Outreach leader Enterprise team. Today, what we're going to be walking through is a very important element of my day and my time, and the work that I do here at Outreach, and that is KAIA. 

So for those of you who don't know KAIA, it stands for Knowledge AI Assistant. It is our conversational intelligence module that we created about five years ago now. That makes me feel old, but it's great technology and it's something that's been really ingrained in our workflow and through thousands of our customers. So when I think about KAIA, one of the things that I think about as a sales leader is, I need more exposure and more surface area to the conversations that my team is having on a daily basis. 

If I'm not in the conversation, I can't help the conversation. As much as I drink as many of these iced coffees per day as I can to stay on track and to stay focused, I can only be in one place at once. So that's where I need the AI portion of KAIA to kick in and help me do my job and help my sellers win the deals they're in. So let's take a look here at the screen.

Exploring the KAIA Interface and Search Features 

So over here on the left-hand column is our menu of everything Outreach related. I'm going to go ahead and click for the sake of today's timing on this KAIA portion. When I click here, it's going to bring me to my homepage. This is where you're going to see just your basic recordings. 

If you've not set up your KAIA page before, I really encourage you to take a minute to do that. For me, I'm able to just quickly drop down and include the attendees that are on my team. If you're familiar with Outreach, you'll know that the power of our filters. So you can filter against tons of different data points from your CRM, from the type of call, from the date format, to scoring, meeting host, all of that. 

So find a couple of things that are meaningful for you and you can go ahead and save those as your views. So there's a lot of goodness here. One is you're able to see this awesome graph here that's showing the spiky trends in terms of the quantity of calls that related to the search. So 10,000 recordings. 

It's a lot. I'm going to do something a little bit more focused than that. So since I've already mentioned coffee, we're going to go ahead and say just search here, and I'm able to see all of the calls where coffee is mentioned. So pretty basic example. 

But one of the things that I wanted to show is that Outreach's transcript is best in class. So since we have this ability to break down at the most basic level, what's happening in the conversations, it allows us to work the magic of our AI to run against all those transcripts that are happening and tell you what happened in the call and what you need to know. So we'll take a look here at the screen. We're able to see all of the times that coffee showed up in these calls. 

We're seeing 618 coffee recordings match that search. One of the beautiful things about Outreach is that we're layering in several different items against this. Not only am I understanding which call the word coffee was mentioned on, I'm able to really quickly understand who said that and when. So I can go exactly to the conversation. 

I see here that the coffee shop was mentioned, and that's something that's of interest to me. I want to go find out which coffee shop is being talked about. So I can go and click here and it's going to take me exactly to that second within the call, so that I can understand quickly without doing a bunch of listening at 2x speed, exactly what happened. I'll say too, we have our AI assist feature. 

Using AI Assist to Surface Key Moments 

So it allows me to ask questions of that meeting in particular. I'm going to say, can you tell me more about the coffee mentioned on the call? And so using our AI, we're able to search the transcript and provide things to you. Now, I'm asking a really dumb question here, right? 

Can you tell me more about the coffee on the call? It's going to give me the answer for that and you'll see it. And it's going to cite the sources as to when those conversations came up, so I can get into this. But this is actually something that's really helpful for our customers, right? 

We know that the calls that are happening across your sales team, or your sales development team, or your customer success team, or your account management team, or your professional services team, or your customer care team are all in relation to one another. But currently, they're probably siloed from those different teams. Using things like the AI assist are a great way to make sure that one team is able to seamlessly hand off that customer knowledge to the other. And for me as a sales leader, it's a great way for me to make sure that, hey, did Ben ask the questions that we thought he was going to ask on that call? 

How did Connor respond to this objection and so forth? So being able to look here and use AI assist without navigating to a different screen is a huge benefit for me. Coming up next, we've got our summary. This is the TLDR. 

Summaries and Content Cards for Fast Context 

It's telling me exactly what happened. We're seeing this in conversational intelligence features, honestly, everywhere in the market. One of the things that I would say is uniquely different about Outreach is that our CI was trained on specific models for sales and for customer experience. And so we're not just capturing specifically like, oh, they talked about the weather at the start of the call. 

You know that that's not particularly important what you're looking for. We're looking at next steps and key action items so that you as a sales leader or as a salesperson can quickly come up to speed without navigating to something different. We're also able to highlight specific content cards that have come up on the call and the date of when the call happened. Now, I won't talk as much about content cards here because we can talk a little bit more about this in the next screen. 

Content cards is the heads up display for your sales teams. Many of our customers are selling across multiple product lines or selling across really large territories, and it's hard for them to stay up to speed in what's happening. Outreach stands alone in the fact that we have real-time call recording and transcription support. And so since we're able to do that, we're able to flag real-time things that are happening, right? 

So if, for example, if I mentioned coffee, it is going to pop up and ask, give me a couple of different prompts to say, well, if you're talking about coffee, you should ask if it's hot or iced. You should ask if they like coconut milk or regular milk in it, right? And so when I'm able to do things like that, it allows my sales teams to be present in the conversation they're having. So we show here that it's really easy to add content cards. 

This is something that our enablement team owns internally, but for sales leaders, it's really easy to just create one in a couple of clicks.  

Coaching Cards: Smarter Feedback, Less Time 

Finally, I want to show one more thing here, and this is around the concept of coaching cards, right? So I'm a very firm believer in the concept for sales people that they need to be able to learn and earn in any sort of job that they have. In order for them to learn the profession of sales the best that they can and for them to earn the most money that they can on their commissions and their comp plan for that year, I need to be able to coach them as much as I can, right? 

And so part of that is our coaching cards. So our coaching cards are incredibly unique in that they are AI enabled. And so for me, I can quickly create a coaching card that is going to review calls for me. And so given the magic of Outreach's transcription, right, like we saw earlier with the picking up of coffee across all of those calls, we're able to use that same technology to understand specifically when key moments are happening within our customer lifecycle and deploy coaching cards against that. 

So, call coaching was something that has taken leaders that have worked for me here at Outreach. For a normal like 60-minute call, sometimes it takes about 90, 80, 90 minutes, right? You're listening to the call, maybe it's at speed, you're jotting down some thoughts in your notes, you're uploading those notes and you're sharing them out to the team. Say, "Hey, Ben, tremendous job on that call. 

Here's what I would do differently," right? And so you're doing a lot of start, stop, pausing in order to make that happen. And it takes up a lot of a sales leader's time. However, since last year, since we deployed these smart AI-enabled coaching cards, we're able to review most, you know, call it 30-minute calls in less than 20 minutes because Outreach's AI is surfacing these key moments and is giving you predicted answers for what that looks like. 

So, we can go here to the coaching card report and we're just going to pull up a bigger data set here. So, I want to look at this Baltimore Coach card for a pricing call, right? Something that's really important and we want to understand how that's happened. So, I can understand across the team how are they performing, right? 

AI helped me score those calls and it's helping me give them a complete view of the things that I'm coaching them and their leaders towards. And for me, I'm able to quickly understand, like, what trends are we seeing? Is it clear to me that we're setting an agenda at the beginning of the call? And here, it's showing me that that's 50-50. 

So, that's something in my next team meeting or my next name enablement session. I can make sure that we can say, "Hey, across the board, we need to be setting the agenda at the top of our call better," right? And so, this has been a tremendous asset for me as a sales leader to understand not only directionally what sort of things can my team be doing better that uphold the Outreach way of salesmanship, but also what things specifically can I do to make sure that my team is learning and earning the best they can as a sales rep in my care. There's much more that we can dive into here. 

I want to be respectful of your time and make sure you come back for another episode of Outreach on Outreach. So, I will let you go, but thanks so much for following along. Thanks.