Would love to get feedback from some of the senior RevOps people in here. What experience do you have with pre vs post call prep and analysis and what are peoples thoughts on the growth of in call assistance, especially for newer reps and SDRs?
Spent six years on the GTM side at Toast (through IPO) and have lived in this exact problem, so a few takes: The biggest miss I see is treating pre-call prep and post-call analysis as two separate things owned by two separate tools. They're really one loop - post-call insight only matters if it actually changes what the rep does before the next call. Most orgs never close that loop, so you end up with a graveyard of recorded calls and scorecards nobody acts on. The bottleneck is almost never data anymore; it's manager time to turn that data into something a rep can do differently on Monday. On in-call assistance for SDRs/newer reps - I think it's genuinely useful for ramp and for high-volume, more scripted motions (cold outbound, qualification). It shortens the deer-in-headlights moment and gets people to competent faster. But two real risks: 1. Crutch effect. If a rep is reading next-best-action off a screen, they're not building the listening muscle that actually makes them good. You get competent-faster but plateau-sooner. 2. Cognitive overload. Mid-conversation a nervous SDR can only process so much - live prompts can make them a worse listener, not a better one. My honest bias: in-call assist gets you to "competent." The human coaching loop - post-call patterns feeding targeted prep and 1:1s - is the only thing I've seen reliably get reps to "good," especially early when the habits stick. In-call is the band-aid; coaching is the cure. I'd invest there first. Curious what others are seeing on adoption though - feels like a lot of teams buy the in-call tooling and then struggle to get reps to trust it live.
Thats a really good take and lots to think about there. Thank you Eli
of course, DM me if you want to talk more!
Agree with Eli's framework here and we've been working through exactly this. A few things we're doing: Starting point is huge. Seems obvious, but I've seen the instinct of leaders (myself included) seeing breakdowns in prep or follow-through be to assume a skill gap or a motivation problem. So before we jumped to a solution, we went and talked to reps directly. Needs varied by tenure, as you'd expect. Assuming 1+ year tenure (majority of our reps), we found ours often know what good looks like. The friction was the time and context-switching required to actually stay on top of and progress opportunities. That informed how we approached the solution. What we've built or are building across the three stages Eli outlined: Pre-call: A simple agent that pulls and formats account and contact context the way reps actually want it, delivered in Slack where they're already working. Not another tab to open, not another tool to learn. Adoption has been strong because it meets them where they are. Is having a great impact. Post-call follow-through: Big gap for us. Not just missed tasks, it's the accumulation of jumping from meeting to meeting with no clean handoff or time for impactful follow thorugh. We're building an assistant that captures action items, drafts follow-ups, and queues, tracks, alerts on next steps. Worth noting: both of these are currently rep-initiated, and we're fully aware that's the floor, not the ceiling. The more mature version triggers automatically the moment a call ends. Realize plenty of teams are already there, we're not, but we know where this goes. Coaching: For us it's largely about the delivery mechanism. Reps want coaching, what they don't want is a 30-minute session or a laundry list. What we're looking at initially is immediate post-call scoring against a rubric tied to the highest-leverage moments in that call type, surfaced as 2-4 bullets the second the call ends. Timely and specific enough to change behavior on the next call rather than the next QBR. There's also the in-person reality for us -executive briefings, conference floors, customer on-sites are a big part of our engagement. Building dependency on in-call assist in a virtual context and then sending a rep into a room without it is something we're mindful of. On the adoption point, totally agree, and it tracks with where we've landed internally too. In-call assist gets reps to competent faster, and that's genuinely valuable. But for our more experienced reps, the plateau risk is real, and frankly the bigger wins for us right now are upstream: coaching, follow-through, prep quality. We actually looked at a vendor in this space and got close to a POC, but other priorities won out. I'd want to see a really focused use case with clear evidence it's working before we revisit. Curious if anyone here has a specific example where in-call assist moved the needle for a tenured rep population, not just ramp.
Thanks Annie, also a really good take and very well thought out.
