Sales leaders, managers, enablement: How much time do you spend trying to understand why some conversations evolve into closed won deals and others don’t? Or why some reps have higher win rates than others?
Thanks to advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), you no longer have to wonder about questions like this. Instead, you can use Conversation Intelligence to make sense of the highly valuable insights you get from customer-facing conversations to impact sales performance, your business direction, and the quality of rep coaching.
For Growbots, using Conversation Intelligence contributed to a 3X increase in sales output.
But first, what is conversation intelligence?
Conversation intelligence (CI) platforms are a new sales technology category that delivers insights from sales calls and virtual meetings / video conferences. CI records, transcribes, and analyzes sales meetings to deliver deep AI-driven insights to the sales team. These insights help improve sales team performance by:
- Identifying what works or doesn’t work in your sales playbook and talk tracks
- Surfacing winning behaviors from top reps to the rest of the team
- Leveraging the voice of the customer to drive deals forward and inform company strategy
There are plenty of applications for Conversation Intelligence, but here are five of the highest value use cases to pursue:
1. Set Performance Standards & Benchmarks #
Conversation Intelligence provides a unique opportunity to understand how your top sellers sell. This enables you to create new performance standards and benchmarks. Uncover what top reps say and do during different parts of the sales process, and how they progress deals through the pipeline in new or unique ways.
By establishing data-backed patterns and best practices, you can lift your entire team’s performance level.
2. Onboard New Hires #
Onboarding is a critical touchpoint in any organization. It not only provides a platform to efficiently ramp reps to success, but it’s also where you establish your culture.
Conversation Intelligence can help you establish a coaching culture - one where continuous improvement and collaboration are expectations and celebrated markers of your team’s success.
Whereas before it was difficult to expose reps to a wide variety of scenarios quickly, building playlists for different stages of your pipeline, customer types, and around key objections enables reps to learn quicker.
In the past, reps were also inconsistently trained as they shadowed a variety of team members, often clinging to the style they liked best, and listened to completely different calls. Today, those challenges are eliminated with Conversation Intelligence.
3. Coach Reps #
Just like with on-boarding, coaching is an area that sales leaders know is important, but often struggle to scale. In fact 47% of sales leaders admit they spend less than 30 minutes coaching each rep each week.
However, poor coaching is one of the number one reasons why sales reps fail and quit. In fact 60% of sales reps say they’ll leave if their sales leader is a poor coach.
Conversation Intelligence helps sales leaders scale coaching often through the implementation of film reviews.
4. Automate Note-Taking #
Conversation Intelligence automates note-taking and helps you organize data around key words or triggers. Reps are able to tag key people within the organization who might benefit from a snippet and use the customer’s voice in internal communication and even follow-up emails. “Remember when you said... No? Well, here!”
Because reps can track the insights that are gathered and understand trends, they feel more closely connected to your business and decision-making process.
Automation also ensures that the most dynamic information is tracked over time, including next steps and potential risks.
Rather than scoring deals based on stage, deals can be scored and prioritized based on what actually happened in the conversation improving accuracy.
5. Draw Insights from Sales Conversations #
When it comes to leveraging Conversation Intelligence for insights gathering, there are many ways you can draw insights from sales conversations.
Here are a few of the most common:
- Forecasting — assess signals that indicate a deal may be fast-moving or at risk
- Deal & Account-Specific Insights — get rich insights on specific deals and accounts, such as how different prospects object within a single deal
- Insights by Stage — identify best practices within each stage of the sales cycle that can help push a deal through faster
- Voice of Customer — bring the customer’s voice into your sales process, product development, and marketing
- Competitive Intelligence — understand why your team is losing or winning against competitors, what talk tracks resonate (or not!), and accurately track your win rates
