The News: In early September, Zoom announced it is rebranding Zoom IQ for Sales as Zoom Revenue Accelerator based on feedback from its customers. The company says the new name better reflects the company’s vision of providing tools to help sales teams gain meaningful and actionable insights from their interactions with customers.
Although Zoom Revenue Accelerator currently includes a variety of AI features—meeting summaries, chapter summaries, sentiment, engagement, talk/listen ratio, intelligent automatic extraction of next steps and good questions, and an email smart-compose feature to help complete sales meeting follow-ups—the company has announced it will incorporate new capabilities in the fall, including Virtual Coach, Deal Risk Signals, and Discover Monthly, which are essential to supporting the company’s platform strategy.
You can read a Press Release containing details of the announcement on the Zoom website.
Zoom Rebrands Zoom IQ for Sales as Zoom Revenue Accelerator
Analyst Take: Zoom announced it is rebranding Zoom IQ for Sales as Zoom Revenue Accelerator and will introduce in the fall of 2023 several additional features that are designed to enhance the platform’s capabilities. These new capabilities are designed to create a fully featured engagement platform that can improve productivity and to automatically surface additional insights that sales teams can use to improve performance.
Virtual Coach Provides More Dynamic and Consistent Training
Organizations face the key challenge of ensuring that sales professionals receive the proper training to ensure they are able to interact with prospects and close deals efficiently. Many managers simply do not have the time or resources to conduct personalized and ongoing training sessions, and as a result, sales teams may not be working up to their potential.
Zoom’s Virtual Coach is designed to provide a customizable and dynamic training environment that simulates a real conversation to accelerate onboarding and train sales team members on new products and methodologies. The platform offers objective assessments of a sales professional’s performance so that they can act on these recommendations to improve consistency in messaging and delivery.
Virtual coaching has become popular, as it frees sales managers to focus on deal-related activities and provides a more objective and data-driven method of training salespeople. Zoom’s inclusion of this training feature on the platform provides two benefits: it allows salespeople to use the same platform to conduct training and real sales interactions, and it reduces the IT lift required to implement another application solely for training.
Leveraging Data to Improve the Sales Process
Another challenge faced by sales managers is ensuring that deal pipelines are being properly monitored and managed. For enterprises with large sales teams that are engaged with a high number of prospects, managing this process manually can be inefficient and ineffective, a challenge that Zoom Revenue Accelerator is clearly trying to address.
Zoom’s Deal Risk Signals will allow sales teams to use a rules-based engine to send alerts if the deal has not moved forward within a specified time period, to help teams understand where deals are in a sales pipeline.
In addition, the Discover Monthly feature is designed to track how competitors are being mentioned on calls, and summarizes these trends monthly, helping revenue teams reveal insights and execute more effectively.
These two tools are designed to integrate even more intelligence within the Zoom Revenue Accelerator, creating additional stickiness. This approach dovetails with the company’s broader “land and expand” approach of creating a platform that appeals to a specific department or use case and then adding features, functions, or integrations that help drive utilization in other areas of the enterprise.
Zoom’s focus on driving the visibility of its product portfolio beyond meetings and phone via Zoom Revenue Accelerator is essential to the company’s long-term success, particularly as other SaaS-based vendors increasingly incorporate and integrate collaboration tools and feature sets. Further, competitors such as RingCentral, have previously incorporated sales assistant tools into their platforms, thereby raising the bar on the must-have features for collaboration platforms.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
