Zoom IQ for Sales, or Zoom Revenue Accelerator as it’s now called, is a conversational intelligence feature for Zoom meetings. While you probably know Zoom for being a reliable video conferencing platform, it’s now venturing into the AI space and gathering insights into your calls (specifically sales calls) so that you can close more deals and free up your pipeline.
If this is all news to you, then we’ll start at the beginning.
What is Zoom IQ for Sales?
Firstly, let’s get one thing clear: Zoom IQ for Sales is the old name. In September 2023, Zoom renamed its AI specialist to Zoom Revenue Accelerator. It does exactly what it says on the tin.
But… Most people still refer to it as Zoom IQ for Sales. As such, we’ll be using both names in this article interchangeably.
What’s the Point of Zoom Revenue Accelerator?
So you might be thinking that the name isn’t clear enough, or perhaps you want to know the granular details. How exactly does it work and why should you bother with it?
Well its whole purpose is to transform customer interactions into valuable insights for identifying opportunities, assessing risks, and managing overall sales team performance. It does all this by leveraging AI and machine learning algorithms.
How Does It Enhance Sales Strategies?
The first thing you’ll notice when using Zoom Revenue Accelerator is that it has a dashboard. This dashboard shows your performance over time and metrics across all your meetings. Essentially, it’s your one-stop hub for all your conversational insights.
While that might not sound too flashy, it’s worth taking a look at the dashboard for yourself.
As you can see, the dashboard gives users a top-down overview of their entire pipeline, covering everything from open deals to upcoming conversations, and critically, your performance.
The performance tab is particularly interesting as it covers your talk speed, talk-to-listen ratio, longest monologue, and even the average amount of conversations per deal. This helps you self-evaluate your performance and make changes to improve your sales game. The dashboard even offers recommended targets for you to aim for.
Another way that Zoom IQ for Sales enhances your sales strategies is by summarizing and simplifying your conversations post-call. You no longer have to manually go through each call trying to find important information. Zoom’s AI creates “Smart Chapters” that break the conversation into chunks, each chapter having its own title, thumbnail, and text-based summary.
This means you can find important information in a flash, saving you time and energy that could be better spent selling.
Additionally, and we’ll touch on this more later, Zoom Revenue Accelerator integrates with thousands of apps, including plenty of CRM systems. Instead of manually filling out your CRM after each conversation, Zoom Revenue Accelerator will automate it so that it’s done for you. Just another glimpse at how AI and machine learning can revolutionize sales management through seamless automations.
Finally, the tool enables revenue optimization. This empowers users to organize deals by priority and fix pipeline blockages before they spiral into something bigger. All this, and you don’t even need to leave your video conferencing platform!
How to Use Zoom IQ for Sales?
Admins are responsible for setting up Zoom Revenue Accelerator with their teams.
It’s available for both Zoom Meetings and Zoom Phone. You can also use it on both the web portal and the desktop client, ensuring you have access to your conversational insights whichever way you use Zoom.
To access Zoom Revenue Accelerator’s 27 different transcription languages, you’ll need a Pro, Business, Enterprise, or Zoom Phone standalone account. You’ll also need to be a licensed user with a Zoom Revenue Accelerator license.
So, Why Did it Rebrand?
As mentioned earlier, Zoom IQ for Sales was renamed in September 2023 to Zoom Revenue Accelerator. The reason behind this is clear: the new name better reflects Zoom’s vision to provide tools to help sales teams gain meaningful and actionable insights from their interactions with customers.
The addition of revenue intelligence to Zoom’s arsenal, partnered with the fact that it’s available at no additional cost to Zoom’s paid users, makes it a standout offering. The new name more accurately describes its purpose.
Zoom Revenue Accelerator Roadmap and Features
Already stuffed with features, Zoom Revenue Accelerator enables users to optimize their revenue by managing their pipeline more efficiently. They can improve their sales performance, summarize and automate conversational intelligence, and even receive deal risk signals that alert you if a deal hasn’t moved forward in a specific period of time.
There were a few features released at the tail end of last year, including a virtual coach. This empowers users to leverage a customizable and dynamic training environment that simulates a real conversation to accelerate onboarding. You can also use the virtual coach to train sales team members on new products and methodologies more effectively, even getting an objective assessment of their performance that they can act on to improve consistency in messaging.
Zoom IQ for Sales also released a feature for tracking competitors. Discover Monthly enables users to uncover and summarize trends every month to help steer revenue teams toward more effective strategies.
More recently (August 2024), Zoom added Conversation Explorer. This feature allows users to run questions by the AI across single meeting transcripts. This means your team can quickly find the answer they’re looking for. For example, if your question was, “What were the assurances the prospect asked for?” then the AI will intelligently read the transcript and let you know the answer based on the conversation.
Zoom IQ for Sales also released a feature in which you can compose emails with your AI companion. You can command the AI to refine your text by expanding it or changing the tone to be more appropriate to your audience.
There are no specified upcoming releases, but Zoom regularly updates their website when new features are to be expected.
Does Zoom Revenue Accelerator Have Many Integrations?
The short answer: yes.
Zoom marketplace is home to thousands of integrations and it’s thought that Zoom has around 2,800 integrations in total. This is not including third-party apps like Zapier, which can connect you to an additional 6,000+ apps.
There are dozens of CRMs, sales tools, and automation softwares that connect seamlessly to Zoom Revenue Accelerator. Whether you want to forward your conversational intelligence to a centralized repository or to a more advanced sales engagement platform, you can.
How Does Zoom IQ for Sales Hold Up Against Industry Standards?
Zoom IQ for Sales has a lot of advantages that make it an interesting choice for those looking for sales and revenue intelligence from their conversations. For starters, it’s directly included in the paid plans of Zoom account holders. If you’re already a paid Zoom user, that means you get it for free.
That’s a pretty big advantage if you ask us. Especially as most industry leaders are separate applications dedicated to the conversational intelligence side of things, meaning you still need to use a video conferencing platform like MS Teams, Google Meet, or Zoom to actually record in the first place.
Having it all in one place lets users cut down on an unnecessarily bloated toolkit. A recent report suggests that 40% of all SaaS applications either duplicate other solutions or go completely unused. Zoom Revenue Accelerator lets you use one tool instead of two.
However, before we move on, let’s discuss the elephant in the room. If these other applications don’t do the video conferencing themselves, that means their sole purpose is to extract, summarize, and automate conversational insights. In other words, all their development is going towards AI and sales automation, whereas Zoom is a larger company and this is just a relatively recent subset. For Zoom, it’s a feature. For these other players, it’s their bread and butter.
So what do the current industry leaders offer that Zoom Revenue Accelerator doesn’t? Well, as it turns out, quite a lot.
Zoom Revenue Accelerator’s Limitations
Privacy
One of the biggest drawbacks of Zoom Revenue Accelerator is its privacy concerns. Zoom has openly stated that it trains AI on user data, including calls if it has consent. As far as the industry goes, this is a big no no.
Manual Note-Taking
While small, it’s also worth noting that Zoom IQ doesn’t let you take notes manually during a call. Automated note-taking is great, but sometimes there’s something you want to add that the AI just hasn’t picked up on. Maybe the conversation has reminded you of something else that needs to be jotted down, but the AI doesn’t have the same context as you and won’t make that note. This can be frustrating as you may end up struggling to remember the note and contribute meaningfully to the conversation for the rest of the call.
Multi-Meeting Intelligence
While Zoom’s single meeting intelligence is fairly standard, it lacks the ability to gain insights across multiple meetings at once. This isn’t quite industry standard yet, but the top players are already including this feature – and it sets them leagues above the rest.
Just imagine, you’re a sales manager that wants to review their sales team’s weekly performance. Industry leaders will allow you to summarize all your team’s relevant meetings in one swoop, gaining insights into trends, patterns, and overall sales team performance. This is fantastic for managers in multiple industries, not just sales. It lets them stay on top of things. The very best tools automate this feature by enabling users to schedule recurring reports based on predefined criteria.
Concurrent Meetings
Zoom does allow concurrent meetings, but this is limited to 2 and only on the Business and Enterprise plans. Other competitors enable users to record multiple meetings simultaneously, even on lower plans.
Zoom-Only
If Zoom isn’t your default video conferencing platform, then this may be a hurdle for you. Zoom Revenue Accelerator only works with Zoom. That means you can’t hold meetings on MS Teams, Google Meet, Webex, or any other platform.
If your entire business communicates on one specific platform, adopting Zoom IQ for Sales would necessitate that you transition to an entirely different video conferencing platform. While it’s not the end of the world, it’s certainly not smooth or seamless.
AI Tags and Comments
Zoom IQ for Sales doesn’t let users comment on the transcript. This is an industry standard feature that allows teams to collaborate within the transcript itself.
Similarly, the lack of AI tags makes it fall behind in terms of organization. Users aren’t able to bookmark things to come back to. You get what Zoom IQ gives you and you have to deal with it.
Transcript Languages
The transcripts for Zoom Revenue Accelerator are available in 27 languages, including English. While this is a decent amount and should cover the majority of users, most high-end competitors offer upwards of 40 different transcript languages.
Sales Coaching
The Zoom IQ for Sales dashboard might lead you to believe that it has some form of sales coaching, however it is very limited in nature compared to the industry standard. While Zoom does provide you with some key stats for self-analysis, it doesn’t help you mid-call like other platforms might. It also doesn’t provide sales playbooks or scorecards without integrating with other apps.
An even bigger tragedy is that Zoom IQ for Sales doesn’t feature any objection handling tips at all. Some of the biggest competitors will gather intel on objections and provide tips for how to best overcome them.
No Free Option
While Zoom Revenue Accelerator is included in the current paid plans at no additional cost, that means nothing to those who aren’t already Zoom paid users. You won’t be able to access the features unless you fork out for a paid plan. Admittedly, Zoom’s paid subscription tiers are quite affordable, but the complete lack of a free plan is hard to overlook.
For example, some of the top Zoom IQ alternatives feature unlimited translatable transcripts, AI summaries, and limited advanced features before you even spend a dime.
Speculations for 2025: Upcoming Sales and AI Trends
With the evolution of AI, Sales is becoming more automated and more effective. While we can’t predict the future, we can see that this is going to continue. It’s reasonable to predict that Zoom Revenue Accelerator will want to capitalize on any AI advancements to make its tool more competitive.
Here are a few that might come to pass:
Accurate Deal Forecasting
For example, we can assume, given the name change, that Zoom Revenue Accelerator will incorporate advanced predictive analytics to predict deal outcomes more accurately. It could use machine learning models that analyze historical sales data, customer behavior, and market conditions to make precise projections, and perhaps even automate them. It could even pull data from CRM systems and external market conditions.
Advanced Automation
It’s also thought that the tool could advance by focusing more on end-to-end sales workflows. By maximizing automation, you make the user’s life easier. If this can be done from lead generation and nurturing, all the way through to closing the deal, Zoom IQ would be on to a winner.
Enhanced Sales Coaching
As mentioned in the limitations, it can only be assumed that Zoom Revenue Accelerator will up its sales coaching game too, offering real-time coaching and analyzing live calls on the go. It will perhaps utilize multi-meeting intelligence to personalize training programs to tailor them to individual sales reps based on their past performance.
Ethical AI Use
Finally, we can hope that they will lean more towards ethical AI and data transparency, enabling users to continue using the tool without contributing to LLM’s knowledge base.
Of course, this is all speculation, but it appears that the industry is moving towards more seamless automations, sales coaching, and revenue intelligence. We can only assume that Zoom Revenue Accelerator will follow suit.
As AI, and particularly AI within Sales, is a fast-moving industry, we advise you to stay up to date with emerging trends and advancements in the space. Only then will you be able to determine whether or not you’re getting the best deal.
Conclusion
To be blunt, Zoom IQ for Sales is a good deal, especially if you already have a paid Zoom account. If that’s the case, you’ll get the entire tool at no additional cost and you can test it out to your heart’s content.
It has some promising features and it can certainly help you improve your sales strategies, but it falls short compared to industry leaders when it comes to multi-meeting intelligence, sales coaching, and overall data privacy.
However, this is a fast-moving industry and there’s no reason to suggest that Zoom won’t release new features in the future that help it level up. It definitely has the manpower and the resources to do so.
Keep on top of new breakthroughs and you’ll be able to stay ahead of the curve. It’s a fast-paced industry, but it’s worth the time and effort to stay on top of things. Ultimately, the best software will get the best results. And that’s what we all want.
