Driving Continuous Improvement in Sales Performance with Chorus.ai

Selling is a team sport in modern sales organizations. Seamless collaboration — and the ability to surface relevant information at the right time to drive a great customer experience — are essential to sales success. But ironically, sales teams are often bogged down by the very same systems and applications designed to help them work smarter and faster. Troops, the leading integration platform between Salesforce and Slack, is helping break down those barriers with its Slackbot for sales.

Troops allows sales and other revenue-generation teams to push and pull CRM data in and out of Slack instantly, turning the collaboration tool into a sales hub. With the Troops platform, users are automating key workflows, accessing insights that make their jobs easier and eliminating busywork. Meanwhile, within the Troops organization itself, the sales team is working hard to keep pace with intensifying customer demand for the platform — and to gather timely insights from the field that can help advance the success of the Troops.

Moving to a More Reliable and Transformational Solution #

Managing the sheer volume of calls from prospects and customers is an ongoing challenge for the New York-based startup’s sales team. So, too, is extracting valuable and timely insights from those calls about customer needs — and how reps are talking about the Troops platform. Troops’ Co-Founder Scott Britton says it would be ideal if he could personally sit in on all of the sales calls and analyze team performance, but as a leader of a growing sales organization, he just doesn’t have the time.

Troops also struggled in the past to maintain a reliable repository of sales calls because their erstwhile conversation intelligence solution was underperforming. That meant Britton couldn’t always access calls he wanted to review when he found the time. “Calls weren’t getting captured entirely, or at all,” he says. “So, a lot of opportunities for coaching, or for our product team to understand what our customers want for our product, were simply not being captured.”

He adds, “It got to the point where I couldn’t coach my reps effectively. I also couldn’t give new reps the feedback they needed to onboard quickly and successfully.”

Britton says the Chorus.ai conversation intelligence platform grabbed his attention almost immediately after he started searching for better technology. “I strongly believe that every sales team should leverage conversational intelligence as a part of their tech stack,” he says. “After researching different solutions, I realized Chorus.ai was the platform that would make us the most successful.”

He says, “Chorus’s real-time transcription is amazing. Having the ability to understand immediately what happened in a sales call and dive into it with my reps is just a huge benefit.”

Building a Coaching Culture—and Fortifying Deal Forecasts #

Chorus.ai is helping Britton foster a coaching culture in the Troops sales organization. And he says all sales team members — including himself — are motivated to use the platform regularly to refine their skills. “I would recommend Chorus to any sales team that’s focused on improvement,” he says. “It holds me to a high standard and drives accountability.”

“Chorus.ai has been immensely helpful to me because I do a lot of self-reflection on my performance,” says Gary Valenti, Founding Account Executive at Troops. “I review my calls at least once or twice so that I can improve my active listening skills. Through that process, I often find that I missed something important that a prospect mentioned during the initial sales call. Chorus catches everything I miss, and that helps me to be more effective in my follow-ups. It’s like my notebook.”

He adds, “Chorus.ai helps me build better relationships with my customers. I can make them feel like I’m sitting on their side of the table because I really understand their challenges and needs.”

Troops Account Executive Ross Taylor likens reviewing calls in Chorus to watching a film study in sports. “It’s crucial to improving my performance,” he says. “I use Chorus.ai throughout the sales process. It helps me prepare for calls, and to get more context from past calls. It also helps me confirm that I’m following our 60/40 rule — that is, allowing customers to do most of the talking.”

“There’s more rigor around ensuring that the deals our reps put into forecasts are real,” Britton says. “One of the biggest benefits of Chorus.ai is the deal view. I can dive right into sales calls to verify my reps’ opportunities — and determine if any deals are at risk.”

Britton says the ability to track when competitors are mentioned in sales conversations, and how often, is another way that Chorus.ai is creating value for Troops. “We never had that visibility before. It really helps us to understand how we are perceived in the market,” he says.