What we do at Oktopost

Oktopost is an all-encompassing B2B social engagement suite that empowers modern data-driven professionals to fully manage and optimize social media to drive their businesses forward in a scalable and measurable way. Oktopost provides employee advocacy, social media management, corporate and employee branding, social selling, social listening, and social analytics solutions to more than 3,000 global businesses worldwide. Our customer-facing team — Wingman’s power users — has twelve Account Executives (AEs) and eight Customer Service Managers (CSMs).

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The main problem we solve with Wingman

We wanted a platform to record and transcribe our calls with prospects and customers. We use these recordings for everything from product research and onboarding to sales coaching.

So, we were looking for a tool that lets us scour through emails, calls and non-phone conversations to instantly look for keywords and “a-ha" moments. Wingman fits the bill perfectly! It’s helped us create a searchable archive of all our conversations so we can go back in time and find whatever we need to quickly and easily.

‍Today, every customer-facing role at Oktopost uses Wingman to record and transcribe their conversations.

How we found and chose Wingman

We were using Gong before for all of our call recording and coaching needs. However, we felt that Gong's features weren't aimed at growing businesses like ours, but rather at bigger organizations and enterprises.

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Also read: Comparison of Wingman and Gong

We began the search for a solution that was the best fit for us and our needs and we discovered Wingman — a company that delivers constant innovation, easy access to customer support and complete transparency.

Besides the impressive culture and work ethic, we chose Wingman because of the “real timeliness" of the platform.

With Wingman, the conversations get recorded, converted into text and analyzed in real-time. This, plus the pop-up suggestions (sales battle cards) during customer-facing conversations, is super helpful for our new recruits.

How we train and onboard new reps with Wingman

Our new reps record their calls and during onboarding, they listen to the recordings on Wingman. The managers highlight specific parts of the recordings and share them as snippets to convey insights on customer or prospect behaviors. Hearing the words directly from the customer rather than a salesperson is an extremely powerful add-on to the training process.

Also read: Now Playing—Game Tapes

As the training progresses, the reps accompany their managers (AEs or CSMs) during customer-facing conversations such as demos, discovery calls or QPRs.

How we coach with recorded calls

When an average football fan and a professional football coach watch a game, they see different matches. While one pays attention to all the nuances within the football match, the other sees the ball going from one side to the other.

The football analogy applies to call coaching. We listen to sales conversations asynchronously and dig into them to leave notes, comments or feedback on ways to improve, or suggest an alternative approach.‍

With Wingman, sales coaching doesn’t necessarily mean scheduled sessions.

Our sales manager can go into Wingman at any time, maybe even during the weekend, and listen to calls and leave notes. These notes can be reviewed anytime during the week by our reps, which makes sales coaching much more easier and effective. No need to constantly look for free slots on calendars. And face-to-face catch-ups can be much more qualitative and personal, instead of transactional.

Furthermore, when managers post comments on calls via Wingman, sales reps don’t have to respond. So managers can just say, “I listened to your call and this is what I suggest for improvement” and share their feedback as a one-way channel. They can set up a discussion if they want more information but that's not essential. We’ve seen that a suggestive approach puts a positive spin on the entire learning experience instead of making it a combat zone.

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How we enhance our platform with Wingman

As we are a customer-oriented company, customer suggestions, product research and innovation are an important part of our culture. And this is where Wingman’s recordings come very handy — we are able to record, analyze and share feedback from our customers and prospects very easily and objectively.

The simple truth is that while our AEs and CSMs have several ideas on how to improve our product, sometimes there's a disconnect between what a customer says and what a CSM hears because ultimately, CSMs aren't product people or engineers, despite knowing our product inside out.

With Wingman, our product team doesn’t have to ask questions like “what did they say?” or “how did they use it?” anymore. Instead, they save a lot of time and effort by just looking for the relevant Wingman snippet and listening to it themselves for product feedback.

For example, let’s say that we’re tracking all mentions of social listening as it’s a potential sales objection. With Wingman, our product team can tune in to all the conversations that mention social listening, get the context and decide whether a feature could help us close future deals.

Whenever someone is listening to a call, it's always going to be subjective based on where they are coming from. It makes sense to have an impartial, objective recording of a conversation and then have different people review it across different layers.

What I really like and use Wingman for the most

As you know, we recently raised $20 million funding from Expedition Capital.

Wingman actually helped us during our fundraising process.

We were able to easily pick out important feedback on Oktopost to highlight what our customers and prospects were thinking, and share it externally. Having that searchable archive was an incredible advantage for us.

As we now scale and grow the global team, we will need to set up more processes and when it comes to rep onboarding, we are using Wingman to get that system in place. Besides just listening to sales theory, it really helps to listen to the actual voice of the customer. Wingman helps with this crucial part of the sales process.

But even more, what stands out is our experience of working with Wingman.

Wingman’s team isn’t just looking to grow their profit. They really care about their customers and their success.

We have access to the Wingman team through email, chat and Slack. And there’s an open channel between Wingman admins, customer support and the users. So anyone with an issue, question, comment or suggestion can email or message on Slack and someone always responds right away.

The impact of Wingman for us

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So, the ROI doesn’t matter because you need Wingman to run a growing and transparent business. Wingman records and transcribes all customer-facing conversations. It’s like living inside a box and listening in on the ecosystem of your customers. You need this knowledge to grow as a company.

So, would I recommend Wingman?

Definitely, without thinking twice! We love Wingman and use it every day.

It’s a tool that we need to run our business, just like we need a CRM for customer and prospect interactions and engagements, or Zoom for video conferencing. The amount of business knowledge and product-related context that Wingman contains is invaluable to us. This makes Wingman indispensable for rep onboarding, sales training, coaching, product development and even hiring.

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