How to use Smart Topics for Kaia

Objective

Use Smart Topics to easily track mentions of products and competitors in sales conversations recorded by Kaia.

Applies To

• Outreach Administrators
• Outreach Users
• Sales Leaders and Managers
• Outreach Kaia

Before you begin

What is Smart Topics?

Smart Topics is a feature within Outreach Kaia that solves a key problem for Sales Leaders: knowing what's actually being said in sales calls about your products and competitors. With Smart Topics, you quickly define what to track (a product or competitor), AI assists in the setup, and you get an instant preview to confirm accuracy.

The Smart Topics feature analyzes calls from the last 30 days and going forward, giving you immediate insights into how your team is positioning products, handling objections, or discussing competitors. This allows you to make faster, data-driven decisions for coaching and strategy without digging through recordings yourself.

Key Functions

• Create Topics Easily: Quickly define topics for Products or Competitors.
• Instant Validation: See examples of where your topic is matched before you publish.
• Track Mentions: Monitor how often key products/competitors appear in conversations.
• Historical Analysis: View trends based on the last 30 days of calls.
• Inform Strategy: Use the data for coaching, understanding positioning effectiveness, and tracking messaging adoption.

Considerations

• Smart Topics requires Outreach Kaia and relevant permissions to view Kaia recordings and manage topics. Check with your Admin if you don't see the options.
• Currently, Smart Topics focuses specifically on tracking Products and Competitors.
• Smart Topics analyzes calls from the last 30 days (historical backfill) plus new calls going forward. You'll see data quickly after creating a topic.
• While Smart Topics is designed to be much faster to set up than the existing Custom Topics, users can opt to create either smart topics or custom topics as required by their workflows.

Procedures

Create and Publish a New Smart Topic

1. In Outreach, do either of the following:
   • Click Kaia in the left nav > Topics report tab > + Topic button.
     
   • In the upper right corner, click the actions button > Topic.
     
2. In the Add a topic window, select either Product topic or Competitor topic, as applicable.
   
3. Define your topic.
   1. Enter a clear Name (e.g., "Feature X Pricing", "Competitor Y Comparison").
   2. Add a brief Description (e.g., “Acme Corp is a competitor for us in the smartphone market”).
   3. Provide two or more Keywords which you want to look out for regarding your competitor/product (e.g, “Acme”, “Acme Corp”, “Acme Phone 2”).
4. Click Next.
   
   
5. Review the instant topic examples preview, showing 2-3 examples of calls where your topic was likely mentioned to ensure your trust that the topic is working correctly.
   • If topic mentions exist, the system will find them and present them to you.
   • If the topic and keywords are for something new (like a new product), the system will present AI-generated examples for you to review.
     
6. Optionally click Back to adjust any of the topic fields, then Next again to regenerate examples.
7. When you are satisfied with the preview, click Publish. The system will start analyzing historical (last 30 days) and ongoing calls for this topic.

Once done, you’ll land on the Topics management page (Administration > Tools > Custom topics). From here, you can manage (edit, retrain, re-publish, remove) both Smart Topics and Custom Topics. Learn more here.

View Smart Topic Insights

The Topics report (Kaia > Topics report tab) is where you can see the data and trends for your Smart Topics. Analyze how often they appear and potentially correlate with deal stages or outcomes (depending on your org’s reporting capabilities).