Let's be honest—Gong.io rules the roost in the conversation intelligence category. If given a choice, every B2B business would want to snag Gong for their teams.
But because Gong's pricing is not for everyone, there are other (admittedly second-tier) Gong alternatives in the conversation intelligence market that offer similar capabilities at a lesser cost.
This post is essentially about three of those software that fill the gap that B2B teams feel for not being able to afford to Gong.
If you are evaluating between these three choices, it's likely that you're a fast-growing B2B organization that is looking to improve its revenue operations or sales enablement responsibilities.
But how do you decide which one checks all the boxes for you and aligns with your business goals? I did some deep digging around to help you make the right decision. In this post, I compare Salesken vs Clari vs ExecVision across several business use cases to give you a good idea of what fits your needs the best.
Salesken vs Clari vs ExecVision: The Key Differences
It’s their product positioning.
Before being acquired by Clari, Wingman positioned itself as a platform for real-time sales coaching for sales reps to bridge the gap between coaching and action. It still does—but now their domain redirects to Clari's homepage, so now it's all about Clari Copilot, formerly known as Wingman.
Salesken promotes itself as a conversation intelligence platform that helps sales teams improve their performance while reducing acquisition costs. Meanwhile, Execvision positions itself as a conversation intelligence software that improves sales performance by changing human behaviors.
SalesKen Vs Clari Copilot
While they both offer similar features such as call recording, sales coaching, and performance analysis—they want to be known for different things. Copilot is focused on leading the sales coaching category while Salesken aspires to lead the conversation intelligence market by openly competing with incumbents like Gong and Chorus.
Clari Copilot vs ExecVision
ExecVision positions itself as a conversation intelligence software that improves sales performance by changing human behaviors. ExecVision helps businesses mine customer insights and translate them into actionable improvements across sales, support and contact centers.
In other words, they both enable sales. The core difference between Copilot and ExecVision boils down to the ways in which they position themselves with subtle differences in audience segments (e.g., enabling agent performance in contact centers vs. sales across SMB SaaS companies).
Salesken vs ExecVision
ExecVision wants to cater to a broad spectrum of the market by offering features that span across sales, support, and contact centers. Salesken—on the other hand—offers sales-specific capabilities like lead scoring, conversational analytics, and automated playbook execution.
One thing that is common across all the above software is that they all claim to be a conversation intelligence platform in some form or another.
What Is Conversation Intelligence Software?
A conversation intelligence software typically records, transcribes, and analyzes customer and prospect conversations. The software allows sales reps, account managers, and customer success managers to gain deeper visibility into their conversations and learn how to improve those conversations.
The foundation of these software programs is to record calls and meetings and use artificial intelligence (AI), convert speech into text, and then do more advanced analysis on it. Thus by default, all products featured in this category include call recording and transcription capabilities.
But since email is a key channel for sales conversations, these platforms also analyze email content these days. Using natural language processing (NLP), these platforms analyze conversations to identify topics discussed, talk patterns, questions asked, customer objections, sentiment, and more.
These insights help business teams to:
Get visibility across all conversations to make data-driven business decisions
Identify the best talk patterns to achieve their sales quotas and other revenue goals
Track deal-related issues so that customer-facing teams can improve the win rate
Coach and onboard their team continuously in a lot lesser time
To be clear, conversation intelligence isn’t only confined to sales. It’s a technology to help all customer-facing teams like the product, marketing, sales, and customer success to record conversations including user research interviews, surveys, or the voice of the customers.
In fact, leveraging conversation intelligence cross-functionally ensures that the customer intelligence is democratized across the organization thus enabling every function to feed into each other.
Interestingly, these conversation intelligence platform players also compete in two other categories, i.e., sales coaching and sales performance.
What is Sales Coaching Software?
Sales coaching is the process through which B2B sales managers mentor, train, and manage their reps. However, sales coaching is less about telling your sales reps what to do and more about enabling them to improve their sales skills.
Oftentimes, a sales coaching software offers a similar range of features you will find in a conversation intelligence platform—video recording, analysis, conversation libraries, etc.
But since sales coaching is focused more on the training aspect, it has specific features that enable managers to run role-play sessions, score the trainees, give them feedback on their performance, and curate best practices to ramp up the sales training process.
What Is Sales Performance Software?
In their product messaging, Copilot and ExecVision offer sales performance analysis and performance management as part of their solution offerings respectively. But what does that mean or what problem does it really solve?
Here’s how Gartner defines sales performance management:
...a suite of operational and analytical functions that automate and unite back-office operational sales processes. Sales performance management is implemented to improve operational efficiency and effectiveness. Capabilities include sales compensation management, objectives management, quota management and planning, territory management and planning, advanced analytics and gamification.”
Basically, it has software capabilities to amplify sales enablement with the help of planning, analysis, and performance-based incentives. Now that the software terms are out of the way, let’s dive into understanding which software belongs to which category.
Is Clari Copilot A True-Blue Conversation Intelligence Software?
Going strictly by the definition of conversation intelligence—yes, Copilot is a conversation intelligence software. Copilot offers call recording, AI-assisted transcription, and conversation analysis capabilities to help sales teams document important customer insights and review them later.
You could argue the same about tools like Otter.ai or Fireflies.ai—two other tools that have recently graduated to the conversation intelligence category from their humble beginnings as speech-to-text software.
Coming back to Copilot, it doesn’t extend its conversation intelligence beyond the sales use cases. By their own admission, they provide conversation intelligence “for fast-growing sales teams” only.
Copilot’s conversation intelligence capabilities make a lot of sense if you want to look at it primarily as a sales initiative and aren’t intending to make other functions such as product or customer success leverage the tool any sooner.
Is Copilot A Sales Performance Management Software?
More or less, yes. Copilot offers a list of features like a visual snapshot of the sales team’s performance, deal intelligence and review, and topic insights to analyze a call’s content better.
Is Copilot A Sales Coaching Software?
Just like conversation intelligence and sales performance, Copilot lists real-time sales coaching as one of the products under its offerings. The features that it offers as part of the sales coaching software are:
Contextual cue cards
Coachable moment bookmarking
Real-time alerts to nudge sales reps to stop talking for too long
This is a smart vertical positioning by the Copilot team.
Is Salesken Really A Conversation Intelligence Software?
They are definitely categorized under conversation intelligence on G2, but primarily position themselves as an AI-based sales assistant. And by their own definition, they are a “GPS for Sales Success.” Though they have coaching and analytical capabilities based on customer conversations, they too (like Clari Copilot) are focused on sales use cases only. When you look at their features, it feels like a mix of CRM, sales coaching, and analytics.
The bottom line—SalesKen is focused
So, Is Salesken A Sales Coaching Or Sales Performance Management Software?
A thorough look at the list of Salesken’s features will tell you that though they have some sales coaching features, a majority of it actually maps to the sales performance management.
Their current capabilities include:
Leveraging real-time cues during sales conversations
Using analytics and diagnostics to improve customer interactions
Granular visibility of the sales pipeline based on customer conversations
ExecVision: A Conversation Intelligence Software, A Sales Performance Management Software, Or A Sales Coaching Software?
ExecVision’s conversation intelligence offering is a step-up from Clari Copilot and Salesken because it offers features and fulfills use cases that are beyond just sales.
On top of the sales-heavy solutions like sales effectiveness and performance management, ExecVision also helps improve customer experience and retention, QA and compliance, and voice of the customer. Besides sales, ExecVision serves QA teams and contact centers too.
While they serve different functions, they don’t necessarily enable or empower collaboration across cross-functional teams.
That said ExecVision offers the following capabilities as part of its offering to enable sales coaching:
Making coaching plans
Sharing and annotating conversations
Customizable scorecards
Measuring coaching effectiveness
Feedback requests and self-reviews
Under its performance management capabilities, it lists out the following benefits:
Multi-level transparency
Align agent performance to KPIs and
Align business outcomes to increase engagement
Deliver consistent, direct feedback and coaching
Scalable quality assurance and compliance
Optimize training
All said, their core focus is conversation intelligence and hence don’t call themselves a sales coaching software or sales performance tool.
How To Choose Between Salesken, Copilot, And ExecVision?
All three brands are up-and-coming product companies, have pretty comparable offerings from a product and functionality standpoint, have raised multiple rounds in funding, and have glowing customer reviews on software comparison websites.
All of this makes it even more difficult for anyone to choose between the three. While I have done the research to help you arrive at your own conclusion, let’s first understand how to evaluate these tools.
Key Factors For Evaluation
1. Pricing
While pricing is not always a roadblock for buying the right kind of software, it’s important to go with the one that doesn’t break your bank or doesn’t justify your investment. The problem arises when websites aren’t upfront in their pricing point—in an era when it’s a competitive advantage in the B2B SaaS world.
So if you are evaluating the above three software, one of the aspects to base your buying decision on, is the pricing clarity these brands offer.
Questions to consider
Who are their target audience—is it small businesses, mid-market, or large enterprises?
Is the pricing affordable, flexible, and fair?
More importantly, is the pricing simple enough to understand?
Do they have monthly billing options or do they force you to sign annual agreements?
Is there a minimum platform fee, initial implementation, or setup fee?
What about ongoing customer success and training? Is there an extra/hidden fee?
2. Ease Of Use
More than 60% of B2B users say that ease of use is a very important consideration when choosing a SaaS solution. User-friendliness should be among your biggest priorities when choosing a software program for non-technical business teams. So make sure the platform you choose offers an intuitive interface and doesn’t come with a lot of moving parts.
Questions to consider
How easy or hard is the tool to set up?
Do you need a dedicated admin to manage the tool?
Does the vendor provide support to help with the initial setup and implementation?
Do they offer onboarding materials, video tours, FAQs, or user guides to help explain the product to the new users?
3. Product Functionality
It’s a no-brainer to discard products that lack the features you want. But of late, buying software poses an opposite challenge—they often come loaded with features that are of no use to you. Avoid software tools that are laden with feature creep because they tend to be clunky and confusing for the end-users.
Questions to consider
How robust are the product functionalities and features?
Do you really need all those functionalities or are they overkill for your company’s needs?
How good is their integration with other tools that you use?
Do they have native integration or is it via third-party APIs?
4. Scalability
Buying a B2B software is almost always about solving an ongoing problem keeping its future impact in mind. In other words, don’t just look at a platform that serves your current needs. Instead, choose a tool that will fit your future requirements.
Questions to consider
Does the tool accommodate your current and future use cases?
Will this tool scale to other functions in the organizations when the need arises?
How costly are their plans when you add new users to your team?
Now that you are armed with all the required information, let’s compare the three software on a 1:1 basis.
Evaluating Salesken vs Clari vs ExecVision: Step By Step
The Short Version
Here’s a snapshot of what each of the above tools promises, their core strengths, their pricing range, and their target market. At a high level, you won’t see a lot of difference in their offerings—unless you dig deeper to understand the nuances.
1. Ease Of Use
All three—Copilot, Salesken, and ExecVision are rated highly by their customers.
If you look at their side-by-side comparison on G2, Copilot has 463 reviews and is at 4.5/5 stars. However, Copilot and ExecVision are nowhere to be found in the top 10 "Easiest To Use Conversation Intelligence Software" category.
In comparison, customers have rated Salesken 5/5 with a total of 353 reviews. But they don’t feature in the top 20 conversation intelligence ‘easiest to use’ tools. If ease of use is a high priority in your list, there's no second-guessing Salesken.
2. Product Functionality
Copilot
Clari Copilot positions itself as a conversation intelligence platform for sales teams while distinguishing their use cases into three major areas—improving sales coaching, improving sales pipeline, and making sales enablement more effective.
Improving sales coaching: Copilot automatically analyzes your team’s sales calls and performance with the help of AI. It helps you identify winning sales behaviors and make correlations between variables like cold call openings or objection handling.
Improving sales pipeline: This gives visibility into your sales pipeline and helps your team go from first call to close with confidence. This also means that you can predict your sales revenue based on data instead of basing it on guesswork.
Effective sales enablement: These are capabilities to help you create processes and playbooks, analyze sales calls at scale, and understand the voice of the customer.
Salesken
Salesken also offers conversational intelligence for sales teams, but a closer look at its capabilities shows that they are more leaned towards providing sales coaching and performance management solutions.
For instance, they specifically offer four features—lead scoring, real-time sales coaching, conversational analytics, and automated playbook execution.
Lead scoring: These are insights for inside sales teams to help them understand which leads are likely to convert based on past conversations.
Sales coaching: Real-time, contextual cues for the sales team to improve their conversation quality and close deals easily.
Conversational analytics: A dashboard for sales managers to ensure that every salesperson follows the winning playbooks in their organization.
Automated playbook execution: This gives sales coaching insights into what their team is doing well or which are the areas they could improve on.
ExecVision
ExecVision talks about applying conversational intelligence across your organization—sales, support, and contact centers. However, most of its feature offerings map to the use cases for sales and contact center teams.
ExecVision’s products range across conversation intelligence, coaching, conversation libraries, and QA and compliance. Although ExecVision lists security and integration as its offerings, it is pretty much table stakes for all software in the category.
Conversation intelligence: A way for you to record, transcribe, and analyze voice and web conference interactions. ExecVision too leverages AI, machine learning, and deep learning to come up with actionable insights for business teams.
Coaching: Customizable scorecards to help you align your teams on best practices, consistency across skills, and behaviors. ExecVision’s proprietary Insights-to-Performance Gap helps sales managers provide feedback and improve their sales reps’ performance.
Conversation libraries: A repository for you to create and organize a knowledge base of best and worst customer interactions. This helps sales managers train and onboard new recruits, upskill the team, and record important product and feature ideas.
QA and compliance monitoring: ExecVision helps QA teams reduce the need for outsourcing or hiring additional QA agents by documenting and scoring more calls. This functionality also allows QA managers to receive smart alerts so that they can give relevant feedback to improve agent performance.
What’s Missing?
None of the above platforms offer summarized notes or some sort of curation capabilities to improve cross-functional collaboration and sales coaching.
Summarized Notes
Salesken, Copilot, and ExecVision—all of them give you call transcripts but they don’t offer a quick, one-page meeting summary that serves a very practical purpose. Summarized notes is an automated one-page overview of the entire conversation that captures the key points discussed and the next steps.
So if you want to make sure you remember what tools your prospects mentioned they are using currently or the features that your customers are asking for—summary notes will automatically extract that information for you so that you don’t have to take your attention off of the conversation at hand. You don’t have to scour through all the calls or the full length of a meeting to find the relevant information.
Another thing that is missing in the product functionality of all three software is the collaboration aspect across cross-functional teams. Business teams are, by default, siloed business islands. The silos between these teams are widening further in today's remote world.
And when you invest in a solution that only serves one team without extending its benefits to other departments, you isolate these teams even further. But if you give them the possibility of collaborating through a common platform, they all can share important insights, contribute to each other's success, and solve even the most pressing business problems.
You need a tool that lets you share feedback and collaborate cross-functionally, be it commenting on a customer conversation or collaborating to prepare an agenda.
Playlists
It would be nice to organize your audio/video recordings (calls and meetings) into curated content that you can categorize by use cases, meeting types, departments, and other such contexts. ExecVision has conversation libraries, which is a comprehensive folder for all your recordings under the same roof. Salesken offers snippets, but that doesn’t give you the whole picture.
3. Pricing
Clari Copilot
Wingman’s pricing plan used to start from $500/rep/year. But since getting acquired by Clari, they have taken the high road like Gong or Chorus and made their pricing available upon request. Yikes.
For a brand that implies 'clarity', their pricing page should have maintained the transparency that Wingman had maintained.
Anyway.
Salesken And ExecVision
When you visit SalesKen or ExecVision's websites, you won't find their pricing right off the bat.
Welcome to the SaaS pricing hellhole.
There is also no clarity as to whether you can use their product for a free trial—which is a clear indicator that they want to appeal to upper mid-market/enterprise clients.
Therefore, if you want a demo of their platforms, try out their features, or want to know about their subscription plans—you have to fill a form on their website so that one of their SDRs can contact you back.
I scoured the internet and got partly lucky—I found reviews on ExecVision’s and discussions on publicly available forums like software comparison sites. And it seems like the basic cost of ExecVision’s license starts from $1,254 per license per annum. That means a minimum commitment of at least $5000 per annum if you start with five licenses—offering no room for you to switch to another tool before the end of the year.
What’s Missing?
On average, it looks like you will be spending $1200/seat/annum with ExecVision while we have no idea how much Clari or Salesken cost. All three solutions don’t offer much flexibility, in terms of pricing, as well as usage tiers.
I declare the pricing round a stalemate between all three. Other conversation intelligence software like Avoma, Otter or Fireflies do a much better job of offering upfront pricing clarity. Perhaps you can choose between them.
4. Scalability
Both Clari and Salesken are primarily used for either sales coaching or sales performance for SMB and mid-market companies.
ExecVision goes beyond sales and extends to contact centers, compliance, and customer experience. But their features are sales-heavy and also targeted at fast-growing mid-market and enterprise clients who are continuously hiring more sales reps or account executives.
But what if you are not planning to hire sales reps beyond a point? What if other functions such as product, marketing, or recruiting teams want to leverage the platform to record and transcribe their meetings? What if you want to make prospect and customer intelligence democratized across all functions in your organization?
What’s Missing?
All of the above platforms have limitations when it comes to enhancing cross-team collaboration outside of the sales team. None of the three offer collaboration-friendly capabilities to bring the product, marketing, sales, and customer success teams together.
The collaboration aspect of conversation intelligence is crucial to help these teams—not just to close deals, but—to exchange important customer insights and build a predictable revenue by improving customer experience and retention.
Final Verdict
1. If you are in the SMB space and your use cases are specific to sales—go for Copilot or Salesken depending on what’s more affordable and scalable for you.
2. If you are a mid-market or enterprise looking for a conversation intelligence platform that offers solutions across sales, contact centers, and QA teams—then ExecVision is your best bet.