Orum vs. Nooks: What dialer is right for your company

Organizations have crossed the chasm where AI-powered dialers have gone from a nice-to-have to a need-to-have tech stack addition. Parallel and power dialers are key components to growing revenue, as the majority of all sales pipeline now comes from the phone.

Companies of all sizes, from startups to firmly established Fortune 500 companies, routinely choose Orum over competitors, including Nooks, because of Orum’s superior AI-powered calling solution, the data gravity within Orum’s platform, and the features available to their sales team. Organizations, including Shipstation, Abstrakt Marketing, Ramp, Crunchbase, and hundreds of others, maximize their activity and continue to succeed in the most challenging sales landscape in recent history with Orum.

As meetings become harder to book and require more touchpoints than ever, sales development tools that create a calling culture and connect reps directly to prospects are essential. In this article, we’ll compare Orum and Nooks software and provide decision criteria for selecting the right dialer for your reps.

About Orum

Orum is an industry-leading AI-powered dialing platform that helps teams produce more pipeline, ROI, and revenue by automating the calling process. It identifies human speech, filters out non-productive numbers, and navigates phone directories, saving teams hours of manual work. Orum's features include efficient sequences, pre-recorded voicemails, and a virtual Salesfloor. Orum is designed to increase the rate of actual human conversation, making sales processes easier, faster, and more meaningful.

About Nooks

Originally founded as a virtual collaboration space, Nooks expanded into dialing capabilities as a secondary feature. Nooks is an AI-powered parallel Dialer and Virtual Salesfloor that focuses on increasing the number of dials outbound SDRs can make per day while also increasing rep collaboration through their virtual classroom-turned-salesfloor

Choosing a dialer for your team

Several years ago, the initial draw of platforms like Orum and competitors like Nooks who followed in our footsteps was the ability to act as a productivity multiplier for your sales reps. Using Orum’s power dialer and parallel dialer, sales reps routinely make more than 1,000 calls per day.

However, increasing the sheer volume of calls is no longer the top priority for sales organizations. This “spray and pray” method is something any AI calling tool can now provide. When selecting a dialer for your reps, you need to consider the dialer's performance in terms of connect rate, the percentage of calls where your rep is connected to a prospect.

Organizations need the flexibility to parallel dial large call lists while strategically power-dialing numbers with a higher likelihood of answering. You need a dialing solution that provides both options and maximizes your effectiveness and efficiency with those options.

Dialing Data: Orum’s AI vs. Nooks AI

While Nooks doesn’t publicly provide a connect rate or the number of dials made on its platform, Orum maintains a connect rate of 5.3%. This number increases to as high as 30% when you use platform features like Hot Numbers and Boost Connect.

These Orum features, along with dial tree navigation and connection speed, are derived from our proprietary AI and the insights we’ve gained from the 200 million calls completed on our platform. These historical insights into which prospects are more likely to pick up dramatically increase connect rates.

Both Orum and Nooks have proprietary AI; however, the breadth and depth of Orum’s AI come from years of calls made on our platform. Orum is a platform built by sales professionals for sales professionals. Nooks was founded as a virtual collaboration space, adding dialing capabilities as a secondary feature.

Power vs. Parallel dialing

Power dialing is an automated process where Orum dials each number in your call list one number at a time. When parallel dialing, multiple calls will be placed simultaneously versus one at a time. You will be transferred once the AI has determined you’re live with a prospect.

Orum’s power and parallel dialers were built internally on a proprietary telephony AI platform and are constantly updated to optimize performance and connect rates. The Nooks dialer was built on Twilio, leading to increased lag time and stability challenges. They recently built their own AI with a minimal history of dials from which to draw data and metrics.

Orum’s tech stack integrations

Orum and Nooks provide integrations with your tech stack, including Apollo, Gong, Hubspot, Outreach, Salesforce, and SalesLoft. Orum is the only Live Conversation Platform that worked directly with Apollo’s engineering team to create a direct integration, providing the best experience for your reps.

How Orum’s CRM integrations drive more pipeline

Apollo: Orum seamlessly integrates with Apollo to sync call activity, prospect details, and more. This integration dramatically increases outbound productivity by reducing time spent on manual tasks while syncing two essential aspects of your tech stack.

Gong: Orum's integration combines Orum's boost in call productivity with Gong's conversational intelligence.

HubSpot: You can connect HubSpot to Orum to call from lists and display prospect details during a call. This integration automates tasks and provides valuable insights into your sequencing and the buyer’s journey.

Outreach: Orum can be connected to Outreach to boost call efficiency and sales workflows.

Salesforce: Salesforce connects to Orum in minutes. You can pull in reports to start dialing and sync data to and from each platform.

SalesLoft: By connecting SalesLoft to Orum, you can sync call activity and display prospect details during each call.

Orum SPAM prevention

Orum focuses on minimizing calls that show up as SPAM. One of the best ways to increase your connect rate is to make sure you call from high-quality numbers that do not appear as spam on prospects' caller IDs. Each rep gets ten monthly numbers in Orum to rotate as needed. Additionally, Orum monitors your numbers for spam on a nightly basis.

Orum provides all paying customers with Grade "A" Caller ID numbers, which are real business lines. Nooks recommends that reps register with freecallregistry.com to avoid getting flagged.

It's not enough to check a call-from number once–carriers have different thresholds for SPAM, and a number that shows up as SPAM on one person's phone may be fine for another.

Orum’s AI capabilities

Orum’s AI continues to increase bridge-to-connect rates and improve the quality of the rep experience, eliminating delays when reps get bridged into conversations with prospects.

Orum also uses AI to provide automatic call notes and Objection Detection, identifying objections raised in recorded calls. These features, combined with Orum’s Call Library, are vital tools for helping reps stay focused on current conversations while training new reps and providing coaching opportunities for managers.

Coaching and analytics tools

Orum and Nooks provide a resource for managers and reps to reference previously recorded calls. Orum’s Call Library can be curated based on persona, rep, objection, or any other factor to create a culture of continuous learning. In Orum, managers and users can curate permanent Call Library playlists that are readily available without the need to sort through the call library every time.

Reporting and analytics are essential for sales leaders, and both Orum and Nooks provide key performance metrics, disposition reporting for every call, and individual rep data. One metric within Orum that is not currently available in Nooks is bridge:connect. This is an important metric to help separate out rep performance from dialer performance. Orum detects a real person and bridges the rep in, but if the rep hangs up or fumbles the call and the prospect hangs up quickly, this metric can be tracked in Orum’s platform but not in Nooks.

Virtual Salesfloor

The modern sales development representative can feel isolated because of the realities of remote and hybrid work environments. Orum and Nooks combat this by providing virtual Salesfloors, collaborative spaces where reps can dial together, learn from one another, and listen to live conversations with prospects.

Nooks was founded as a virtual collaboration space, only adding the ability to call prospects after using Orum. Orum’s virtual Salesfloor is a more recent addition to the platform and continues to add features that help increase connect rates and the number of meetings booked.

The Orum and Nooks pilot process

Customers routinely share that a major reason they choose Orum over Nooks is their sales process experience. A key component of the Orum pilot experience is the ability to include all of your reps, ensuring you have full team feedback available when deciding which platform to use.

Planhat referenced Orum's professionalism and expertise when discussing their comparison between Orum and Nooks. “We did a two-week trial with both Orum and Nooks. Orum’s team did a phenomenal job setting up our pilot and expectations. It was easy for us to see Orum's ROI instantly. Comparatively, Nooks just felt extremely junior. They had too many false connections and lacked Orum's intuitive workflow.”

Orum is dedicated to underpromising and overdelivering. It’s an approach that sales leaders find refreshing. As Kevin Kost of CodeSecure shared, “Seeing that all of Orum’s claims were real was refreshing.”

Eric Watkins, President of Abstrakt Marketing, selected Orum over Nooks because of the overall experience during the sales process and the pilot. He told us, “You purchase from people you believe in and trust, which shone through during our buyer’s journey with Orum. The entire process was first-class, and the Orum team proved their passion for the contract and our success as an organization.”