As inflation hurts the economy, sales teams are doing more—pardon the cliché—than they are turning to AI-powered software to be more competitive. Vendors like Winn.AI offer sales call AI assistants that automatically track, capture and update customer relationship management entries. There are also two different platforms, Unique and Gemini, that both use AI to analyze customer conversations.
Believing there was room for another startup in the growing space, Jason Dorfman co-founded Orum in 2018 with Karthik Viswanathan. The company bills itself as a “live chat” platform that helps sales reps connect with prospects while automating some of the more tedious parts. Sales development process.
“The pandemic has changed the way outbound sales teams communicate with their prospects. As companies shift from face-to-face interactions to digital, the need for real, voice communication to build richer relationships has become a more important part of the equation, Dorfman told TechCrunch in an email interview. “By automating workflows… reps using Orum can focus on having quality conversations with prospective customers rather than the tedious and repetitive work of trying to reach them.”
Gold It uses AI to identify, identify and connect with sales opportunities by automatically navigating time sinks like phone trees. The algorithm tries to detect when a sales rep has met a real person, hit voicemail, or reached a bad number, saving rep time. A data enrichment tool extracts new numbers for automated leads, syncing contact data between Orum and platforms like HubSpot.
Prior to starting Orom, Viswanathan led Affinity Engineering, a “relational data” platform focused on investment banking and private equity. Dorfman led corporate sales at Rubrik, an initiative to bring cloud data management products to the small and medium business market.
Orom’s software uses AI to identify callers and navigate phone trees, as well as identify “dead” numbers. Image Credits: Gold
“Having meaningful, live chat time with business-to-business customers is critical to a successful sales process. However, having your high-value sales reps spend their days listening to phone calls, trawling through directories and manually leaving voicemails doesn’t make business sense,” says Dorfman. He said.”Gold It allows teams to make hundreds of calls in minutes, helping to automate data and improve it over time.
Orom solves a real problem. According to Gartner, it can take 60 to 90 calls to get an appointment with an agent, and conversion rates for cold calls are typically about 2%, with 20% for solid leads and 50% for referrals.
But the question is whether it is sufficiently differentiated from other AI-powered sales tools on the market. Dorfman said he was referring to Orum’s ability to provide delegates with full contact details, notes and campaign information, and give managers the ability to listen to — and search — transcribed calls. With platforms like Connect and Sell, Connect Leader, Xant, the recently acquired Five9 and Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud doing so, Dorfman argues that Orom is stronger than most.
Clients like QTS and Workato believe this to be the case, it seems – as well as Orom’s investors. Orum today closed a $22 million Series B round led by Tribal Capital, along with Craft Ventures and Uncommon Ventures in a “triad” of the company’s previous — but unfortunately undisclosed — valuation. Bringing the company’s total revenue to more than $50 million, the proceeds will be used to expand Orom’s engineering and product teams and product development, Dorfman said.
“The ongoing macro environment has put companies under financial pressure, which means the need for automation and efficiency is greater than ever,” Dorfman said. But, with stewardship being one of our values as a company, we’ve been incredibly intentional about fundraising and where we spend our dollars. Over the past year, we’ve focused on growing our teams and reinventing our product, which has resulted in how we present and serve our customers as new economic pressures change their needs.
The Orom labor base is currently “just shy” of 130 people. Dorfman expects the company to grow by about 40% by the end of the year, far from being complete.
