AI-powered coaching platform for field sales, Siro, services customers in industries that send sales representatives on-site to sell or perform a service, such as HVAC and home improvement. This traditional selling approach can be a big problem, Siro co-founder and CEO Jake Cronin explains, because many of the “salespeople aren’t getting proper coaching.”
In-person coaching simply requires too much time and capital for companies, especially with sales teams dispersed over wide regions—but skipping coaching can lead to less company oversight over sales practices and reduced revenue for sales representatives.
Cronin and his team at Siro set out to solve this problem by building a platform that would use technology to close the feedback loop and optimize in-field sales practices remotely and at scale.
Since the sales agents work directly in the field, Cronin knew the success of the Siro platform would depend on two main factors:
- Highly accurate speech transcription from recordings on mobile devices (e.g., cell phones or tablets)
- Highly accurate speaker diarization, or speaker identification and labeling, to automatically separate sales agents and customers on these recordings
“It’s one microphone picking up a bunch of different voices,” explains Cronin. Background noise, accents, and other factors also affect the quality of the recording, which directly impacts the quality of the transcription.
Cronin’s team initially added a legacy speech-to-text provider that they hoped would fill this need. But when support tickets started building and customers began churning, it quickly became apparent that they needed a new option—which led them to AssemblyAI.
AssemblyAI’s Universal-2 speech recognition model offers best-in-class transcription and speaker diarization, even in noisy, less-than-ideal recording environments, as well as low latency at 23 seconds on a 30-minute audio file. AssemblyAI’s latest speaker diarization model is also 13% more accurate than its predecessor and demonstrates an 85.4% reduction in speaker count errors.
With AssemblyAI, Siro was able to reduce customer complaints and support tickets by 90%.
Without highly accurate speech recognition and speaker diarization as a foundation, the coaching insights Siro generates—the core of the Siro platform—would fall apart.
Cronin explains that “on 10 out of 10 onboarding calls, our customers are at some point telling us ‘wow that insight was crisp’—and that’s because of the accuracy we’re getting from AssemblyAI.”
By making coaching more accessible, Siro has democratized access to world-class coaching. Field sales representatives across industries see a 20-40% increase in sales growth after using the Siro platform, on average. That’s an increase of around $20,000 in earnings per quarter for most reps.
With Siro, sales reps also:
- Gain 10x in ride-along time savings
- Improve close rate by 36%
- Receive coaching 10x faster
As AI innovation surges, Cronin expects these improvements to only increase, as well as to generate new opportunities for Siro to build additional AI features that improve sales performance in the field for their customers.
