How Orum 3X’d sales meeting rates with AI-powered role play

How Orum 3X’d sales meeting rates with AI-powered role play

See how this leading outbound sales platform used Tavus to turn a once-per-team training exercise into a scalable, gamified coaching engine, driving a 3x increase in meeting booked rates and 25% revenue growth.

"What inspired us to use AI humans in video was the opportunity to recreate what sales leaders and salespeople were already doing, but do it much faster, much more effectively, and at a broader scale."

Bob Aspell, VP of Product, Orum

About

Orum is the calling performance system built to make the phone your most reliable pipeline channel. Powered by intelligence from over one billion sales calls, Orum’s AI knows who picks up, how to coach, and what it takes to book more meetings.

Challenge

Turning high-stakes cold calls into a repeatable skill

The Orum product team understood a fundamental problem with outbound sales: the reps who needed the most practice were the ones getting the least of it. A typical sales rep working the phones might land five to ten genuinely good conversations in a day. Each one matters. Each one carries real stakes. And yet the traditional way to prepare for those conversations had barely changed in decades.

Sales leaders would gather teams in a room, pick one or two volunteers, and run a live role play in front of everyone else. It was well-intentioned. In practice, most of the room watched while a handful of people practiced, and the feedback cycle was slow, inconsistent, and impossible to scale. “A lot of like, Bravo, thanks for being so brave in getting up there,” Bob recalls. The courage to participate was being rewarded more than the conversation skills themselves.

At the same time, the team recognized something about the nature of a cold call that made this gap especially costly: a rep might get a handful of great conversations per day, and every single one of them is high-stakes. There is no low-stakes version of a live prospect call. The rep shows up prepared or they don’t, and there’s no in-between practice ground. Orum had already built exceptional infrastructure for helping reps get on more calls. What it hadn’t yet solved was what happened once they were on them.

When the product team started thinking about how AI could close that gap, the answer arrived quickly: the best AI use cases are the things people would do anyway, now made better, faster, and available to everyone. What had been a once-a-quarter group exercise could become a daily, personalized, gamified coaching loop, provided the AI felt real enough for reps to take it seriously.

That last requirement turned out to be the deciding one. Orum looked at competitors who offered role play tools built on audio alone. They weren’t enough. Without a face across from you, without the visual tension of a live conversation, the stakes never feel real and the practice never translates. Realism and adaptability became non-negotiable, and the search for a solution that could deliver both led the Orum product team to Tavus.

Solution

AI humans that make practice feel like the real thing

The first working prototype came together in days. Thanks to Tavus’s developer-first APIs and SDKs, Orum’s product team was able to integrate the Conversational Video Interface into a working AI role play product quickly, with most of the pacing determined by internal engineering priorities rather than the integration itself.

At the core of the integration, Tavus’ CVI provides the real-time video layer that makes these role plays feel like live sales calls. Raven-1 reads the rep’s tone, gaze, and visual signals in real time, allowing the AI human to respond to signs of hesitation or confidence in the same way a live prospect might. Phoenix-4 renders the AI human’s expressions frame-by-frame, ensuring that the face across from the rep stays visually engaged, showing interest, skepticism, even impatience, rather than cycling through static animations. Sparrow-1 manages the conversational timing so that the role play ebbs and flows the way real sales calls do, handling the overlaps and pauses that define how a conversation actually feels under pressure.

On top of that foundation, Orum’s product team built a comprehensive coaching suite complete with a scoring and grading layer that tracks each rep’s performance across specific scenarios. A rep who scores 3.2 out of 5 on handling a budget objection can go again, immediately, until they’re hitting 4.5. The combination of a realistic AI human and a visible score turns what used to be a one-time training exercise into a loop that reps return to voluntarily, because the feedback is immediate and the improvement is legible.

That dynamic has extended all the way to how Orum’s own sales team uses the product. When a sales leader spots a pattern in call data, budget objections tanking deals, for instance, the team can gather to brainstorm responses, spin up targeted role play scenarios with Tavus, practice against the AI human until they feel confident in a strategy, and then take that strategy back to live prospects. The entire cycle happens inside Orum’s platform, driven by the call data Orum already captures. The feedback loop closes in days instead of quarters.

Throughout the build, Tavus stayed in close contact with Orum’s product and engineering teams through a shared Slack channel. Early on, the collaboration focused on prompt engineering, learning what guidance produces the most realistic role play scenarios and what over-specification causes the AI human to feel scripted rather than adaptive. As the models evolved, many of those early prompting challenges resolved themselves. The partnership continues today, with both teams sharing updates on new releases and refining how Orum uses them.

"When we were considering a tool to build our AI role play product with, something that was non-negotiable for us was realism and adaptability. Sales calls kind of ebb and flow and take on a life of their own. And we needed AI humans that could emulate that."

Bob Aspell, VP of Product, Orum‍

Results

Orum 3X’s meeting rates and closes its biggest deal in company history

The outcomes have shown up across every level of the business. Reps who engage with Orum’s Tavus-powered AI roleplay are booking meetings at three times the rate of those who don’t, a result that has become a core part of Orum’s own sales pitch. Sales leaders Orum works with now actively require their teams to use the role play tools before going back to live prospects, because the improvement in meeting rate is that consistent and that visible.

Weekly engagement with the role play features is running above 50% across the teams that have access, a number that stands out because role play is not the core job of an Orum user. The core job is making cold calls and booking meetings. That more than half of users engage with coaching features every week, voluntarily, reflects something real about how the product feels to use.

Orum has since launched its AI coaching suite to between 60 and 70% of its customers, and attributes roughly 25% revenue growth directly to those features. The biggest deal in Orum’s history closed at the end of last year, and the coaching component of that deal alone would have ranked as a top ten customer for the company. The Tavus-powered role play product was a material part of why that deal closed.

Looking ahead, the Orum team’s advice to anyone considering building with Tavus is direct: trust the AI human to do its thing. The places where Orum has seen the most realistic and effective role plays are the ones where prompting provides basic context and then gives the AI room to adapt. Over-specification, trying to script every response or anticipate every turn, produces a tool that feels rigid. The power of an AI human, as Orum has found, comes from its ability to behave like a real person: responsive, unpredictable, and present.

"A lot of our competitors have role play tools that are audio only. And what we’ve found is that by having that visual and having that emotional connection, it actually creates a more high stakes conversation. It makes the stakes more real, and it makes the practice more effective."

Bob Aspell, VP of Product, Orum

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