Naming a game-changing knowledge assistant
Outreach has quickly earned the number one market position among sales engagement platforms. With aspirations to become a multi-business brand that serves the largest companies in the world, the company was at a critical inflection point. To continue the evolution of its product, platform, and technology offerings, it needed to organize and optimize its go-to market strategy.
Outreach partnered with Lippincott to develop a product naming architecture for its growing portfolio, as well as create a compelling name for its latest product. Meet Kaia – a powerful name to inspire powerful new ambitions.
The product, an AI assistant, uses real-time transcription and analysis to enhance key moments during virtual sales conversations. To help sellers build trusted, ongoing relationships with buyers, the AI program manages the administrative tasks of sales calls by acting as a knowledge assistant, processing and understanding the full context of the conversation to provide relevant insights in real-time and outline action items for follow-up.
When COVID-19 sparked an almost overnight transition from in-person selling to exclusively using virtual platforms like Zoom and Skype, Outreach ramped up the launch of their new product so that it could respond to the unique needs of their customers’ new circumstances. With the product already in development before the pandemic, Lippincott understood a compressed timeline was needed. We conducted a fast-paced yet rigorous naming process, preparing the product for launch in just over a month.
An added challenge was the need to find a legally viable name in very competitive trademark categories: technology and software.
Through qualitative research, we identified several key attributes the new product name had to encompass. The name needed to evoke ideas of an assistant that works with salespeople, not in place of them, it needed to stand on its own separate from the Outreach brand, and it needed to feel friendly, approachable, and helpful, among other criteria.
In a five-week sprint, we developed a legally viable, compelling name that effectively fit the above criteria: Kaia, which stands for Knowledge through an AI Assistant. “Kai” was selected for its truly global phonology, as it is found in 20+ languages that span the continents, with positive meanings that include commerce, strength, and victory. Further strengthening the name is its acronym – emphasizing that the product puts knowledge at the fingertips of the user, in real time.
Kaia officially launched at Outreach’s Unleash 2020 virtual summit. Armed with both the name for its new product and a rigorous architecture to guide the naming process for future products in its portfolio, the company is poised for future growth and evolution.