Why I built Talqo.
A note from Chad Kalik, founder. Ten years selling B2B, and one question nobody in those pipeline reviews could answer.
I spent about ten years selling B2B. Most of that time I sat in pipeline reviews built on optimism.
The ritual was always the same. A manager asks what happened on an account. The rep gives a version of events — not a dishonest one, just the version they remember, shaped by wanting the deal to be real. The CRM says Proposal, entered three weeks ago. Somebody writes a number on a slide. The number goes to the board.
I never once saw anyone check that number against what the customer had actually said.
That gap is the whole reason this exists. Not because reps lie — mostly they don’t — but because nobody has time to reconstruct forty calls a week, so the forecast quietly becomes a summary of hope instead of a summary of evidence.
Talqo does the reconstruction. It reads the calls, and every figure it says a buyer agreed to traces back to a sentence the buyer actually said. Where there is no such sentence, Talqo says so instead of filling the gap.
Talqo is early, and built by one person, deliberately — in the open, alongside its first customers. If that is interesting to you, write to me.
Three things I decided at the start, and have not moved on.
Rep trust comes first
A tool that gets used to punish reps stops being told the truth within a month, and then it is worth nothing to anyone. Talqo coaches the rep before it reports on them.
Every claim carries a receipt
If Talqo says the buyer agreed to a number, you can open it and read the quote underneath. No score without its working, and no buyer’s figure that cannot be traced back to the call it came from.
Delivery flexes, truth never does
How the product looks, what it integrates with, which methodology it scores against — all of that bends to what a customer needs. What a number means does not.
What runs today.
No IT approval needed to find out if it works: paste a transcript and see the read. Connect Teams and your CRM when you are ready.
The product, in more depth.
- Deals that build themselves
- Value and close date are discovered from the call and proposed for a one-tap confirm. On a deal linked to Salesforce, the opportunity’s own Amount and Close Date stand, and Talqo sets what the buyer said beside them.
- A forecast from what’s real
- The number buyers agreed to on calls, set beside the CRM’s own pipeline, and every figure labelled with where it came from: said on a call, or typed into the CRM.
- Coverage against the number
- Your open pipeline set against the number you have to hit, and the gap between them — in front of you before the quarter closes, not after it.
- One call. Four things, ready from one transcript.
- The rep: coaching that watched the whole call. On their side, never a scorecard. And they see every word you do. The manager: a 1-1 briefing without the interrogation. The CRM: CRM fields, written for you to approve. The pipeline: every commitment tracked. Nothing disappears.
- Who it’s built for
- Rep One lever for the week, with the sentence from the call it came from — not a scorecard.
- Manager One row per rep, ordered by how long since you last coached them. Never by score.
- RevOps On Salesforce, Talqo’s own fields beside yours; on HubSpot, the deal’s own stage, value and close date. Every write on your approval, and undoable for seven days while nobody has changed the field.
- Leadership The share of pipeline a customer actually confirmed out loud, and the receipts under it.
- Three proof lines
- Copy-ready: paste the output anywhere. It is formatted to survive. Salesforce-mapped output: fields mapped to Opportunity properties, ready to approve. What Talqo does today, live now: paste-to-analysis, CRM write-back, Teams ingestion.
- Why a deal is a conversation, not a call
- Most tools score a call and move on. The next call starts from nothing, and by call eight nobody can say what was established, only what the last person remembered. By default, the champion confirmed in May reads as July’s call left him, and the deal says May confirmed more. A company that wants him to stay confirmed until someone says otherwise can choose that in one setting.
- Coaching that watched the whole call
- Not generic advice — a specific read on what happened, what was missed, and why it matters for this deal. It is coaching a rep will read: on their side, and never a scorecard.
- A 1-1 briefing without the interrogation
- A narrative read on the rep’s pattern across every call — strengths, gaps, and exactly what to focus the coaching conversation on. No more "so, how did the call go?"
- CRM fields, written for you to approve
- Deal stage, next step and the call summary — written into Salesforce or HubSpot natively, or to any other CRM through a signed webhook. You approve every write; nothing lands in your system of record on its own.
- Every commitment tracked
- Every "I’ll send that by Thursday" becomes a task with an owner and a due date. The ones that don’t get done tell you something too.
- The mirror rule, in full
- The same text, word for word, rather than a summary of it. The manager’s view is built from the rep’s own screen, so Talqo cannot say one thing to a rep and another about them upstairs. There is no hidden manager view and no private score. Every report about a rep is one the rep can open and read in full. The code enforces this and tests lock it, rather than good intentions. The check asserts every key matches word for word, so the day someone writes a manager-only sentence, the build fails. We built it this way because a rep who trusts the tool tells it the truth. A rep who suspects it is reporting on them behind their back starts managing what it sees, and the moment that happens, every number built on top of it is worthless. Rep trust is not a nice-to-have here. It is the thing that makes the forecast real.
- The CRM connections, precisely
- Salesforce: Talqo’s read of the deal stage, the next step, the call summary and what the buyer agreed to write to the linked Opportunity’s custom fields; your Stage, Amount and Close Date are never written. Read-before-write, so any change can be undone to the exact value that was there before — for seven days, as long as nobody has changed the field since. HubSpot: deal stage, amount, close date, and a note on the deal. Connect with a private app token; map your stages once. Property writes can be undone for seven days, as long as nobody has changed them since; notes are archived rather than deleted, and we say which happened. Webhook: setup guides included; a delivery cannot be undone. Microsoft Teams: calls flow in when the meeting ends; nobody uploads anything. Connected per customer during onboarding, against your own Microsoft tenant. Talqo reads transcripts only for the people you map, and only for meetings they organised.
- The roadmap, in full
- Paste or upload a transcript — deal read, coaching, manager briefing, pipeline and forecast in seconds. Structured, copy-ready CRM fields. No IT approval needed to start. CRM write-back is live for Salesforce, HubSpot and anything else via webhook; connect it when you’re ready. Connect Microsoft Teams and map your reps, and the call ends with the intelligence already waiting — coaching, briefing and CRM writes queued for a one-tap approve. Until you connect it, the paste path is unchanged and needs nothing from IT.
- Data handling, in full
- Infrastructure hosted in the EU. Talqo does not retain transcripts after analysis — processed then discarded; items awaiting processing are auto-purged within 30 days. Only the structured analysis is kept, in your account, deletable on request. Our AI subprocessor Anthropic (US) processes them under a DPA and EU Standard Contractual Clauses; retained by Anthropic for up to 30 days (longer only if flagged for trust & safety review), never used for training. Every analysis can instead run on your company’s own Azure OpenAI resource, in the EU region you choose; we connect it with you.
More questions.
What if a later call is weaker than an earlier one?
By default each item reads as the latest call left it, and says when an earlier call had confirmed more. Want evidence to stand until the buyer takes it back? That is one company setting. When a buyer reverses, you see the old sentence and the new one side by side.
What does the manager see that the rep doesn’t?
Nothing. The manager’s view is built from the rep’s own screen, word for word, and the code enforces it. Call scores and coaching never go into your CRM. A rep who trusts the tool tells it the truth, and that is what makes the forecast real.
How does it read a methodology?
Each item reads Confirmed, Weak, Missing or Taken back, gaps first, with the question to ask next. BANT, MEDDIC, MEDDPICC and SPIN are built in. Run something else? We set Talqo up around your methodology.
What does Talqo do with my Salesforce Amount?
On Salesforce Talqo writes only its own fields and reads your Amount to set it beside what the buyer said; it compares money only in the same currency and never converts it.
Do I need IT to try it?
No. Paste one transcript and you have Talqo’s reading in seconds. Connect Teams and your CRM when you are ready.
What happens to what you send.
By sending a transcript you’re asking us to analyse it and reply. We use your details only to respond — no marketing list, no third party, and we don’t keep the transcript after we’ve sent your read back. Want it gone sooner? Reply to our email or write to hello@talqo.dk and we’ll remove your transcript and your details, and confirm when it’s done. If the call has a customer’s name in it, anonymise it first — or ask us to, and we will before anything else happens.