What we do at Annex Cloud

Annex Cloud is a leader in technology and service solutions that transform customer loyalty experiences for organizations, extending valued customer engagements, ultimately making beloved brands. 

Powered by the Loyalty Experience Platform™ solution, our customers capture and use zero and first party data to deliver hyper-personalized experiences across the entire customer journey.

The main problem we solve with Wingman

Annex Cloud is a growing organization and we're growing our sales force very quickly. It's important for us to be able to understand what our sales people are saying and how they're reacting during conversations. 

Having a tool that allows us to capture what's happening on sales calls helps us train the reps better. We are able to prepare better, provide more guidance, prevent revenue leaks, and overall work much more effectively toward closing more deals.

How Annex Cloud benefited from Wingman

We sell more to larger enterprises, because of which our sales cycles tend to be longer. If we get lucky, we have a shorter cycle of 60 or 90 days. But most often the process is at least six or nine months long. And throughout the entire cycle, we have multiple conversations with our prospects.

We typically start by having three to five really large conversations with the client where they bring everybody together. Then throughout the process, there are a lot of 1:1 conversations with the main contact or other folks within the organization.

For example, one of our opportunities started in November and went through March and we had 12 recorded sessions just on that one account. Wingman is with us everywhere, during all of these conversations. It's really helpful for us to go back and show reps from a training perspective not only how salespeople are handling that particular call, but what's happening at each phase of the sales process.

We have entire processes recorded for new hires. They can understand through these calls that they can't make the sales quick, they have to go through certain milestones. They can then learn what's happening at each stage and how somebody before them has done it. That’s one area where Wingman is really helpful.

The mobile app allows me to understand what reps are doing and train and coach them in real time. It also helps me to better understand the market and our customers’ needs. If I forget my phone while going to the gym, I'm very upset because it's my time to listen to the recordings!

Wingman for sales coaching

We're a small team that's growing very quickly and has very big goals. I have 1:1 calls with my team members every week. I speak more often to newer reps who need a little more guidance and support.

If they have a call today, I’ll listen to it overnight and have a conversation with them the next day at the latest and coach them or provide guidance for the next call. This way I can make sure that they don't make the same mistakes again. Or if something went really great during the call, we can go back and say it's awesome, keep going down that path. Wingman is the reference tool that makes all this happen.

Wingman for onboarding new reps

We don’t have a set process today for onboarding reps with Wingman but we’re getting there. Here’s an example of how we onboard reps with the tool today: 

I have a new rep now who has been with us for six or seven weeks and we've identified a number of calls – the first call that happens for the first half hour of the discovery call – for him to listen to and see what happens there. Gradually, we’ll be moving him into deeper demos so he can get a sense of the entire sales process.

Wingman also helps us train our new reps on the job. We have a complex approach when it comes to our solution and pricing, so I listen for how reps are handling those conversations and how we can simplify that further. 

Wingman for our non-customer facing teams

Our whole team is very dependent on Wingman. A lot of times we'll snip out certain parts of call recordings to share with our product team. In case the product team wasn’t on a particular call and they want to know what questions prospects or customers are asking, we can just share the recordings with them. Then they can begin to consider those things for our product roadmap.

We also share call recordings with our marketing team. Our sales enablement folks listen in on calls so they can have a better understanding of what prospects are asking our sales team. They can accordingly enhance the enablement materials that we use and the stories that we’re telling.

The demand generation side of marketing also gets to understand the kinds of questions prospects are asking, how the sales people are answering them, the pain point of a particular client, and how we solve it. So the team uses Wingman to help us create content more effectively as well.

And lastly, we share the recordings with our clients as well. Not everybody can be on that call when we're doing a demo, so we send them the recording and then people from their team can go listen. And what's terrific is once you send that link, you get to know when they listen to it and how many times the link is used. So that's super helpful for us. We get to know that the whole company is looking at our demo, which is really nice to know.

Wingman for building better relationships with customers

We want to make sure that we’re really listening to the client and helping them as opposed to just selling our product. A lot of times, people may just oversell what the product can do instead of actually listening and providing guidance. By reviewing calls on Wingman, we look at some of those nuances and how we can get better overall.

We want to know how we can be more proactive for a particular client and how we can deliver better. I don't ever see that going away. We're never gonna be perfect, right? So that bar keeps rising.

How Wingman saves us opportunities

We're able to address customer needs more effectively call after call. I've already shared that I listen to all the calls, but I also encourage all my salespeople to go back and listen to the calls. This way they can actually be really present during the actual conversations and don’t need to take a ton of notes.

So, the salesperson and I, both listen to the call and we determine what the next steps could be. We are able to brainstorm about what added value we should bring.

So, would I recommend Wingman?

Definitely, I highly recommend Wingman! It's a tool we can't live without. 

As a leader, you can't be on all sales calls, you can't be part of all those discussions that you should be on. So, Wingman helps me understand what’s happening on all my sales calls from how my reps are performing to learning what the market needs..

But it’s not me being a big brother and looking at what people are doing. It’s about knowing how we can improve our product and marketing. And, last, but definitely not least, being able to share calls with the client so their teams can get educated on what we talked about, what we do and what our solution can provide, has been very valuable.