Deepgram transforms unstructured voice data into the voice intelligence businesses need to make game-changing decisions. As a venture-backed and industry-leading technology firm specializing in applied AI, Deepgram is hyper-focused on developing world-class speech recognition systems and scaling its sales organization to meet market demand.

Crowd-sourcing from frontline experts to improve corporate content in real-time

Since launching Kiite, Deepgram has implemented a sales framework that employees buy into. Kiite has helped Chris Dyer, Head of Sales at Deepgram, roll out killer playbooks that sales reps actually use.

“Having our Playbooks as a documented blueprint for success is huge,” says Chris. “In real-time, our reps add great new content from our session notes directly into Kiite, which becomes the Playbook that new hires use.”

Growing pains

With sales outpacing headcount, high-value accounts weren’t getting the level of care and attention they needed. As the sales leader at a startup, Chris couldn’t afford to spend a single penny on wasted training efforts to ramp new staff. To scale his high caliber team, Chris knew that every rep must be able to work 75 demanding enterprise opportunities at a time.

“We can’t afford to have our reps spend 3-6 months to get productive, only to learn that it was a waste of time, simply because the foundations weren’t in place.”

Having scaled sales teams in past lives (Sales Manager at TechValidate Software, acquired by SurveyMonkey in 2017), Chris is no stranger to rapid and demanding growth. He knows what it’s like to try and scale a sales organization. That’s why he’s using Kiite.

“Kiite freed up time and gave us a really solid foundation. Our reps are able to ask specific questions that aren’t clear after using Kiite, and then, in real-time, are able to add additional information based on our training sessions.

“We actually pull up different cards during our sessions, and our reps talk about what they’ve learned, they ask clarifying questions, and then we modify cards as we go so that current best practices are captured and immediately available to all. Reps add content that they want to refer to in the future, because of how easy Kiite is to use.

“The whole flow of content with Kiite really helps smooth things over.”

Get buy-in on the content by using the right tools

For the team at Deepgram, who describe themselves as being incredibly collaborative and data-driven, it’s critical to have both consistency and buy-in from all employees. Including salespeople. Chris loves using Kiite because it lets him establish consistency through the Playbooks framework. And, since Playbooks is designed for sales, Chris gets buy-in from his team because it allows reps to interact with official content their way.

“People do sales in different ways. At Deepgram, we want consistency baked in from the beginning. Kiite helps us present how we typically do things, while getting buy-in on how we do things, because it’s inherently designed to give reps the freedom to operate in their own way. They can learn from what’s worked, and mold their strengths into our process.”

The results

“Our Playbooks foster discussion about why some people do things a different way, and about why what reps haven’t been willing to try things in the past, and what works and doesn’t work with some approaches . We use Kiite to help us reaffirm we’re taking the right approach, while being able to incorporate other ideas into what we’re doing.”

Open collaboration is more than a culture perk. Deepgram is evolving so quickly that it’s a core part of their business strategy. Dynamic playbooks that change as rapidly as their technology advances, aren’t nice-to-have. They’re table stakes.