Optimize your sales teams with the right dialer software. This in-depth review takes an independent look at a new tooling app gaining traction quickly - Bearworks - which in addition to it’s calling features, brings a ‘sales floor’ feel to your fully-remote sales team.
Niche, independent tools can be a good place to start when you have a specific problem you need to solve, and you don’t want to commit yet to an end-to-end platform like Dialpad or Genesys.
Enter Bearworks.
In this article, we’ll break down what Bearworks does best, who it’s for, explore its standout features, and share our honest take on where there’s still room to improve.
What is Bearworks?
Bearworks is an AI-powered sales dialer designed to help outbound teams reach out to more prospects, book more meetings and qualify leads faster.
It integrates with popular CRMs, pulling in key contact data and offering features like voicemail personalization, local number generation, and a smart call staggering to maximize your chances to connect.
Overview of Bearworks: What you need to know
Bearworks includes three main features:
Bearworks Virtual Salesfloor replicates a buzzing sales floor for remote teams, recreating the fast-paced, high-energy environment where reps sit together making calls, handling objections, chasing deals, and receiving feedback in real-time.
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The AI dialer helps your team make more calls each day, and includes features to improve connection rates and deliver more meaningful conversations with prospects.
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Sales Coach is Bearworks’ real-time (and brand new) AI coaching assistant. It listens in on live sales calls and gives your reps instant feedback and guidance, helping them overcome objections and drive better outcomes.
All of these features are connected to Bearworks’ native reporting and analytics platform.
Bearworks can also be connected to other tools in your sales tech stack, such as HubSpot, Apollo, Outreach, and Close.
How Bearworks works
Your team’s day starts with a look at the “Today’s Calls” page in Bearworks.
It pulls in everything a BDR needs, such as customer info, past orders from platforms like Shopify, and cue cards. These cards use branded messaging and can be auto-generated by scraping your customer’s website, helping reps stay on-message and consistent.
Within the Bearworks platform, you can also see the objections raised during previous conversations. During the call, AI analyzes what’s being said and flags objections, scores the quality of the interaction, and summarizes key takeaways.
One of the most powerful features of Bearworks is the ability to customize dial attempts per contact. You’re able to customize your call list based on a ton of features — like which HubSpot list they’re a part of, time zone, language, and lead status — so that you’re not wasting time contacting the wrong prospects.
Features like Parallel Dialing allows you to call up to five people at once, but what sets Bearworks apart is the Call Staggering feature, which lets you leave a delay between each attempt.
With Call Staggering, instead of calling each contact simultaneously (risking a disconnect if a contact picks up at the wrong moment), Bearworks instead tries each one after a short delay (like 5 or 10 seconds apart). This gives your team the efficiency of a modern AI dialer, while minimizing the downside risk of trying to contact several people at once.
General information about Bearworks
Here are some key facts about Bearworks:
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Launched: The company was founded in 2022 by the same team that helped scale Datadog from $50M to $1.5B ARR.
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Target audience: Bearworks target customers are mid-market businesses, usually those with at least 5 people who are actively doing cold calling (across functions like sales or debt collection).
Key features of Bearworks
While Bearworks is quite powerful in terms of what it can do, there are a number of features that make it stand out from other AI dialers:
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Seamless CRM Integrations: Connects with Outreach, HubSpot, Salesforce, Salesloft, and others to sync contacts, activities, notes, and call outcomes directly with your CRM. Contact lists are pulled directly into Bearworks, and as your team makes calls, notes and details are seamlessly synced back to your CRM.
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Smart Call Lists & Filtering: Quickly pull in call lists from your CRM or a CSV, then filter by things like timezone, last call outcome (like “not meeting booked”), or lead status (such as skipping “Open Deal” contacts) so you can focus on the right people.
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Voicemail & Local-Dialing: Create voicemail templates with your own voice. Craft messages for each persona, like a CEO or a manager, using AI-generated voices (including yours) to keep things personal at scale. Plus you can then layer this with automated messages with preloaded audio (like a gentle nudge about an abandoned cart), that changes with each attempt, like a reminder first, then a discount. Caller ID can also show as local numbers to avoid spam filters and boost your chances of getting picked up.
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Parallel & Staggered Dialing: Call up to 5 people at once with parallel dialing. Customizable call staggering maximizes your chance to connect without slowing your team down.
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AI Call Analysis: Bearworks’ AI automatically analyzes every call your team makes, including real-time transcription, call summaries, and scoring. These detailed insights unlock meaningful opportunities to coach team members and improve outcomes.
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AI-Powered Sales Coach: When your team is making a lot of calls, small improvements can have a huge impact. Bearworks’ Sales Coach is an automated way to give your BDR team feedback to keep improving, which means more opportunities generated and faster growth for your business.
Setting up Bearworks
Another thing that makes Bearworks particularly attractive for growing teams is the ease of setup. The onboarding and setup process is fairly standardized, and usually goes like this:
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You’ll start with an initial call and demo with Bearwork’s sales team, during which you can customize your plan, pricing and the features you need.
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Once the agreement or contract is signed, you have the option to set up a short trial period. Before the trial starts, Bearworks carries on an onboarding session where they assist with integration and walk you through a mock call to ensure everything is working properly. You’ll receive clear, hands-on guidance so you’re fully set up and confident using Bearworks from day one.
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After the onboarding session, you’re ready to start using the system. Throughout the process, Slack support is available with both their sales and engineering teams.
Bearworks also recently launched a self-service option for those who prefer a more DIY approach. It’s great for lean teams that need to move quickly, and it’s the fastest way to get started calling prospects and customers with Bearworks.
Pros and Cons of Bearworks
Like any tool, Bearworks has areas where it stands out and others areas where it might not suit every company. Here’s a quick look at what we loved and where there’s still room to grow.
Pros of Bearworks
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Parallel dialing and call staggering is a great combo: As a high volume cold calling team, you can’t beat technology that lets you make more dials while reducing the risk of disconnects.
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Powerful voicemail customization: It’s incredibly easy to create custom voicemails, whether you prefer to use your own voice or an AI-generated voice. These voicemails can be personalized and tailored to create better connections with prospects.
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Local numbers: Using local area codes increases the odds of people picking up, giving your team the ability to have more quality conversations.
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Analytics and manager tools: Bearworks’ AI and reporting makes it really easy for sales managers to understand how their teams are performing, both on the team-level and the rep-level. For instance, you can filter call history by outcomes like “Meetings Booked” or “Human Pickup,” then listen to the recording or leverage the AI summary and scoring to understand what’s working (and what’s not).
Cons of Bearworks
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Pricing model could be more straightforward: At this point, Bearworks’ pricing isn’t publicly available. The final price is customized for each new customer. While this is a great option for companies that need it, more straightforward pricing would improve clarity.
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Focused on mid-range companies: Really large enterprise businesses might find the Bearworks’ functionality doesn’t cover all of their bases.
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Limited if your CRM is not supported: If your team uses a less common CRM, then Bearworks may not be the best fit. While you are able to upload CSV lists of contacts, skipping the CRM integration means you’ll miss out on a lot of the efficiencies that Bearworks provides.
Pricing and Plans
While Bearworks’ doesn’t share pricing on its website, their team shared with us that pricing almost always ranges between $150 to $250 per seat per month. The exact price varies based on the number of seats, the exact features needed, and whether you opt for a monthly or an annual plan.
To get an exact price for your team or business, you can sign up for a demo of Bearworks and speak to a member of their team.
Is Bearworks the right tool for you?
You might be thinking, “We’re not a high-volume team, so we probably don’t need a dialer.”
And while it’s true that Bearworks was built with high volume teams in mind, it also works great for leaner teams. Why? Because it gives sales managers powerful analytics, deeper insights, and tools that help reps to have better conversations. That’s something you can find value in as a sales leader, no matter the size of your team.
At the end of the day, Bearworks is all about getting your team members to talk to more people. Bearworks customers average about a 20% connection rate, which is definitely higher than normal in the cold-calling world. If you have clear product-market fit and an established sales team, Bearworks can take what’s already working and make it even better, helping your reps be more productive and book more meetings.
Bearwork’s alternatives
Bearworks isn’t the only AI-powered dialer out there. Alternatives to Bearworks include:
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Consio: Phone system designed from the bottom up for eCommerce brands (and only eCommerce)
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Nooks: A communication tool using AI to automate and streamline outbound sales calling tasks.
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Aircall: Aircall is a business communication platform offering sales and support teams a fully integrated phone system.
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Orum: An AI-powered live conversation platform that automates outbound calls mostly for sales teams.
Have more conversations that convert with Bearworks
So, is Bearworks worth a shot?
If your team is making outbound calls and getting more people on the line would drive faster growth for your business, then Bearworks is a solid option. With so many features designed for making outbound teams more efficient, it’s an easy choice if you’re looking at making the sales floor – virtual or not – more productive.
As with any tool, it’s not perfect and won’t fit every company (particularly if you’re a large enterprise) but Bearworks will certainly deliver more and better conversations.
If you’re interested in giving Bearworks a shot, they offer a short trial so you can test it out before committing. You can book a demo here, then get started quickly.
If you’re not ready to handle outbound calls in-house or you’re thinking about expanding your call center team, Influx has you covered. We team up with global brands of all sized to build outsourced teams that deliver world-class customer experiences and high-touch sales. Get in touch today to learn more. We can also recommend a specific phone system based on what we’ve seen work with our own teams across different industries and use cases.
