How SiteMinder empowers its sales team and lowers CAC

If you’ve ever stayed at a villa or hotel that wasn’t part of a huge chain—and had a good experience—they might’ve been using SiteMinder.

SiteMinder is a leading hotel commerce platform that helps hoteliers increase their bookings and modernise their operations while providing a good guest experience.

Being a primarily inside sales-driven company, SiteMinder needed a communications platform that gave them deep insights into their prospecting calls, helped with coaching and training reps, and ultimately, could help reduce customer acquisition costs.

Needless to say, they needed something more than just your average phone system or call centre software.

That’s where Dialpad’s Ai-powered customer intelligence platform came in.

Enabling a fast-growing sales team

Nat is SiteMinder’s Enablement Operations Manager and like many Enablement Managers, some of her biggest challenges include finding coaching opportunities and getting recordings and data from calls.

“Our previous solution wasn’t cutting it,” she says. “We wanted to go deeper with call coaching, training, and getting more data from calls.”

On top of that, they wanted to do those different things while keeping a streamlined tech stack. That was one of the things that drew them to Dialpad—the fact that it had the built-in artificial intelligence and telephony in a single platform.

Taking repetitive tasks off the table with Dialpad’s Salesforce integration

Call recordings are one of the best coaching and training tools, and having something that was easy to use was non-negotiable for the Sales Enablement team.

“Dialpad’s recording feature is a lot easier to use than our previous provider,” says Nat. “It was one of the reasons we wanted to move.”

In Dialpad, all the rep has to do is click record from the call screen (there’s also an option to turn on recording automatically at the admin level to reduce manual work for reps). “It’s a nicer user experience. The UI is a lot more clean and fresh than what we came from”:

But the real kicker here is Dialpad’s integration with Salesforce, which lets Nat and her team keep all the recordings in one centralised place. “With Dialpad’s integration, we can create reports in Salesforce with links to the recordings for coaching purposes,” says Nat.

“It makes it easy to see down the funnel and pipeline, and see where deals are slipping—we just click the transcripts and call recordings to dig into them!”

In fact, Dialpad can even embed its real-time transcription and RTA (Real-Time Assist) cards right inside Salesforce so that reps can view the running transcript of a call live—without leaving the CRM:

The other benefit of Dialpad’s Salesforce integration is that it automates a lot of repetitive work for agents like data entry and dispositioning support calls.

“Our struggle is that agents have to do a thousand things manually,” adds Maël, Senior Manager Analytics & Strategy. “Admin fatigue can mean that they don’t always want to go through the extra step of classifying a support call or adding a competitor to a sales call record. We understand that—and with Dialpad, we have a way around this so they can focus on value-adding activities.”

“We have a behavioural metric for every opportunity”

For Maël, his world revolved around customer acquisition and the customer lifecycle. SiteMinder has an inside sales team, which is quite traditional—they’re moving more into product-led growth, also known as PLG, but still have a sales team that is calling and prospecting day in and day out.

“One thing that was very hard to crack,” says Maël, “Was trying to understand our cost of acquisition.”

The issue was that while Salesforce gave Maël and his team a very good view of the sales stages, what it didn’t give them was a good sense of the effort required from the sales team to close deals.

“We could see if prospects were in the ‘requested a demo’ or filled out a registration form’ stage—but we couldn’t see how much time our reps were spending on the phones, how many calls it took to convert a customer, how much wastage there was…” says Maël.

“With our previous provider, it was a black box. Their data environment didn’t connect to Salesforce, and it was very hard to connect that data.”

Now, SiteMinder can connect every Dialpad call to a Salesforce opportunity via the task or account:

“This means we can have a behavioural metric for every opportunity,” says Maël. “For example, before in Salesforce we’d see that it took ‘30 days’ to convert an opportunity. But those aren’t 30 active days—there might have been just three or four calls in there, which was really the time that we actively worked that opportunity.”

For Rev Ops and Marketing teams, that small improvement in data visibility makes a huge difference. “Now, I am able to know how much time we actually spent calling the customer. It’s very useful,” says Maël.

Dialpad Ai-powered win-loss analysis

In the hotel software world, there are literally thousands of software solutions—which means Maël has his eye on quite a few competitors at any given time. And it wasn’t easy keeping track of all of them.

“The other thing that we had a hard time cracking was the win-loss ratio with certain competitors,” Maël says.

Good thing Dialpad Ai can help with that through its “Custom Moments” feature, which lets you create different “Moments” to track different keywords and topics. In this case, competitor names:

Mael was able to build a customised Custom Moments dashboard with the Dialpad Transcript API. This unique custom moments dashboard was able to show leadership at SiteMinder win rates, volume of competitor mentions, and more.

“With Custom Moments, we can track competitor moments in Dialpad,” says Maël. “Let’s say we run up against certain competitors who get mentioned during sales calls. The prospect might be engaged in a parallel sales cycle with those competitors, or have an existing tech stack where we’re trying to replace a competing solution. With Dialpad Ai, I can capture any mention of a competitor.”

“Sales reps can also flag this manually when they lose a deal,” says Maël. “But reps aren’t incentivised on data accuracy. Dialpad is a completely objective metric. It gives us a very strong view of who we’re coming up against, win rates, and so on.”

For sales-heavy companies, this level of insight that’s possible with Dialpad Ai is valuable in many different ways. Not only does it automate customer intelligence gathering like how SiteMinder does it with Custom Moments, it also provides a more accurate and transparent view of performance.

“When you’re in an inside-sales-led company, there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence,” says Maël. “Sales reps will say, ‘I’m not hitting quota this month because this competitor is killing me,’ or ‘This region isn’t performing well because that competitor is coming up there.’ With Dialpad we can now quantify and run validation on this type of noise to understand what is an anomaly versus what is a real trend we should be paying attention to.”

Tackling one of the most expensive parts of customer acquisition

Maël and team have introduced digital ways of onboarding customers but in some scenarios there’s still significant human touch for onboarding to resolve. As in many companies, it’s one of the most expensive parts of their cost of acquisition.

To build conviction around how to make digital transformation happen, Maël needed the data to back up his plan—data that he couldn’t get with their previous “black box” solution.

“We’d been flying blind to some extent, and it’s hard to get funding for digital acquisition mechanisms when you can’t prove that it works,” says Maël.

“With Dialpad, we can aggregate call times and see how long it takes an onboarding rep in terms of work time with the customer to get the customer ready. Now, we have some very objective metrics around onboarding time that we can reduce via product-led tours, tool-tips, and digital engagement capabilities.”

So, what’s next for the SiteMinder team? They’re currently rolling out Dialpad to their support teams as well now that their Sales team is onboard, which means unlocking more support-centric features like Ai CSAT and other coaching tools—their use of Dialpad Ai is among some of the most creative we’ve seen, and we can’t wait to see what they’ll do next with Dialpad Ai Contact Center!