Sales calls can reveal a lot of valuable information about a company’s customers, especially when examined in aggregate. San Francisco-based Talkdesk Inc. today launched a new cloud service intended to help sales teams access that insight more easily.

Talkdesk for Sales incorporates artificial intelligence technology that the startup has originally developed to power its contact center automation platform, which debuted in September. Repackaged into a tool called SalesAssist, the feature records calls made to prospects, analyzes their contents and identifies when a sales representative responds to a potentially important question. The data is then distilled into snippets that can be brought up during future conversations.

If a prospect asks about, say, a certain feature of a software product, SalesAssist can locate any past calls in which the function was mentioned. It displays the answer deemed most relevant to the sales representative in real time so that they can quickly respond with an informative explanation.

According to Talkdesk, the call recordings made by its platform are also useful for managers looking to find ways of improving sales floor performance. Several other startups including the recently funded Gong.io Ltd. offer similar services designed to help companies draw lessons from conversations with leads.

To set itself apart, Talkdesk has paired the core voice analysis features with a set of automation capabilities designed to ease other aspects of sales operations. Users can, among other things, place calls using a number with the same area code the lead on the other end and create reusable voicemail messages to save themselves the trouble of manually recording a new message every time.

Rounding out the feature set is Salesforce.com integration. Salesforce.com Inc. is an investor in Talkdesk through its venture capital arm, leading a $6 million funding round into the startup two years ago. The customer relationship management giant has an extensive track record of backing partners with products that extend its platform’s native capabilities.  

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