Patently sells an AI patent platform to over 1,000 teams in 40 countries. Connor O’Shea is the CRO. Asha Kaur takes the same calls afterwards and turns what customers said about the product into tickets for the development team.
The problem: what customers said went nowhere
Before Doris, Connor tracked deal progress from memory. The bugs, feature requests and objections raised mid-call had nowhere to go once the call ended.
That cost the most at the handover to the rest of the company. With no recording to point at, describing a customer’s issue to a developer meant trusting someone’s memory of a call from days earlier.
It isn’t just about managing deals and the deal cycle. It’s also about how we deal with issues our clients are having. When we’re talking to our development team, they love that we can go back and say “look, here it is on Doris, this is the exact area the issue was happening.”
— Connor O’Shea
The second problem was time. Connor ran back-to-back calls all day and pushed his follow-ups into the evening.
I was back-to-back-to-back in meetings and then having to spend my evenings cramming follow-ups, which is never a good point, because you want to make sure they’re done properly but done as quickly as possible.
— Connor O’Shea
Why they didn’t build it themselves
Patently builds software and the team uses Claude every day, so build-versus-buy came up early. Connor fields the same question from his own prospects.
Of course, with enough manpower we probably could have built something that remotely does the recording. But you have to keep on it — there’s a lot you have to do in the background. Do I think it would be successful? No.
— Connor O’Shea
The economics decided it: the price of Doris against the hourly cost of the people who would build it and then keep it running.
Of course anything’s possible — but it isn’t cost effective or time effective to do it.
— Connor O’Shea
For Asha, the decision came down to who had built the product.
I like that this software has been built by people who have come from a sales background, so you understand the process really, really well. That’s why we trust using Doris for our sales process.
— Asha Kaur
How Patently uses Doris
In the deal, with Connor in sales
Connor uses Doris differently depending on where a deal sits. Early on it checks his discovery. Later it tells him why a deal has stopped moving.
- Early stage: what the key requirements are, what he still needs to ask, and whether the deal needs more discovery before it moves on.
- Mid-cycle: why a deal is taking longer than expected, and what is missing. A gap on the decision maker, or a decision process he had not accounted for.
- Qualification: MEDDPICC tracking that flags the information he does not have.
- Output: follow-ups, deal summaries, CRM sync, and presentation material built from what was said on the call.
The team also rebuilt its internal knowledge base with Doris, summarising past product demos into reference material. Connor says that job used to take “absolutely ages”.
It’s hard to talk about it without it now. It has definitely enabled me to have a lot more control of my deals.
— Connor O’Shea
After the call, with Asha in operations
Asha works the other end. She goes back through the demos and trial calls that Connor and co-founder Andrew run, pulls out the feedback and defects customers raised, and triages them into Zendesk.
Being able to go back through demos and pull out key feedback and any issues people are having, and triage them through our Zendesk ticketing system, has been really, really beneficial.
— Asha Kaur
Alongside Claude, through the MCP server
Patently runs Claude across the business. Connecting Claude to Doris means nobody moves between systems to assemble an answer. One intern, with about 30 minutes of access, produced a full customer FAQ list out of the call archive.
The MCP server integration has been amazing. We use Claude all the time, so being able to just ask Claude a question about a meeting has been amazing.
— Asha Kaur
The integration with other LLMs like Claude is a huge thing for us, because it means I’m not having to use five different systems to track all this. I can just ask Claude, and it pulls in the information that’s in Doris.
— Connor O’Shea
The results
Deals close faster
Compare the deals Patently created before Doris with the ones created after. 165% more of them close inside the forecasted timeframe.
Deals are better qualified
Qualification scores rose 64%. The gain was in what Doris told Connor he had missed, on deals he thought he already had covered.
And the admin load drops
Connor puts the saving at five to six hours a week, a little over an hour a day, almost all of it sales admin.
Whenever I get asked a question by one of our founders — “I want to understand this” — I can answer it in about two minutes. Before, it took me 20 or 30 minutes. That’s the most impressive point.
— Connor O’Shea
Follow-up used to mean retrieving the Teams recording, working through it by hand and querying it by hand. That ran 25 to 30 minutes per call, against six calls a day.
You’re talking about two or three hours of me doing responses and follow-up. So that is a huge time saver.
— Connor O’Shea
What Patently expects next
Onboarding is the next gain Patently expects. The company is hiring an SDR who will move into an AE role, and the call archive becomes the training material.
It’s going to really help them with onboarding — getting to know Connor’s style, how he speaks in meetings, how he gets people engaged in the sales conversation. No metrics yet, but it will be great.
— Asha Kaur
How Doris compares
Connor used a conversation intelligence platform before this one. He found the general-purpose tools capable, but built for conversations rather than for a sales process.
One of the largest providers in the market is harder to use than Doris.
— Connor O’Shea
It used to be quite generic. This is a lot more sales orientated — it always comes out focused on what’s important in the sales process. I took to it a lot quicker.
— Connor O’Shea
Who they’d recommend it to
Connor scopes his answer by team size. The value compounds once you manage other people’s deals as well as your own.
A head of sales or a sales director dealing with the problems of managing people and managing complex sales processes beyond just themselves. It’s fine doing it on your own — but as you have more and more people you’re managing, doing that without something like this is nearly impossible.
— Connor O’Shea
I think it’s valuable for all businesses. If you’re trying to sell a product or a service, it’s useful across the board.
— Asha Kaur