After spending considerable time discussing and evaluating the pain areas of Account Executives and their leaders (Sales Directors, VP’s & CROs), we landed on a common pressing question.
“How to identify a prospect’s intent to take proactive action?”
Sales teams refer to previous prospect engagements to complete a sale. More often than not, the prospect information is scattered. Random notes and call recordings are all over the place and rarely make their way into the CRM.
To make matters worse, several sales reps and managers work on overlapping accounts and misplace or lose track of prospects’ information. Or they end up creating duplicate records of prospects’ information on multiple systems. Are you feeling dizzy already?
As expected, it’s hard to summarize the prospect’s requirement, and it’s even more difficult to conclude their buying intent.
To solve this prolonged issue, we’d like to take help from the Account-Based Sales Development theory by Salesource and slightly tweak it to make some honest recommendations.
The three areas of sales that elevate with Conversation AI
1. Engagement
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Behind any engagement, there is an intention, however big or small. Not necessarily questions around product or problems, maybe simple informational queries.
Tools that enable sales reps to understand the next steps are more valuable than simply capturing client information.
If you want your AEs’ to save time on research and uncovering prospects’ interests and instead use it to focus on more business, you must invest in better sales tools.
These tools will help you deep dive into interactions and engagements to surface the hidden intent that builds relevance and trust.
2. Buying Signals
Insight about the client is an asset for your organization. Getting your hands dirty on client insights for deal closure can turn out to be immensely useful. And, by assessing past and current conversations, you can expedite your future wins.
Having critical insights pop up right after the sales demo or conversations can help create nudge sequences for AE's and marketing teams. Additionally, reps will find guidance and cues to place the right features the customers are searching for.
3. Enablement
Transcribing and analyzing sales conversations play a critical role in deal closing.
Sales professionals like yourself and other team members, vertical heads, sales coaches can guide & course correct sales meetings.
The real-time conversation correction will bring more clarity and have a smoother flow of engagement with the prospect.
You also need to review your sales tech stack periodically. Most seasoned AEs we engaged with still need help in predicting changing market dynamics. Unless the tech stack is helping, there’s no point staying invested.
Sales conversation tools should also enable better conversations with prospects.
Starting with discovery and evaluating need, there is a structure to be created mentally for the opportunity to move from interest to closure. Immense preparation and spontaneous modifications are required to curate the conversation flow.
Showing prospects that you are keen to have them on board and maintaining less desperation also tends to help push their decision.
Instead of making it any more difficult for your sales team, let’s add all the three elements - enablement, engagement, and buying signal- into a single software solution.
Solve critical challenges of Account Executives using conversation intelligence platform:
1. Post-meeting - analysis, call notes, and CRM notes
- Deploying AI enables shortening the review process and removing the guesswork.
- Access action items, follow-up context, and tracking feedback after calls.
- Capture critical moments of all participants for complete clarity.
2. Step up and nurture a valuable deal in the pipeline
- Analyze the decision-maker and influencer’s thought process
- Prepare for the line of objections surfaced during previous interactions
- Collaborate with tech and success teams to overcome prospect concerns
- Course correct to avoid complaints around commercials or competitions
3. Knowledge transfer to other departments - remove information silos
- It helps sales leaders utilize information from all teams by creating an information channel where multiple teams can contribute.
- Relying on the CRM, the single "source of truth," makes it even more crucial to make sure every engagement with the prospect is captured in a single place.
4. Pipeline accuracy with the help of data-driven insights
- Having a clear understanding of which stage the buyer stands in is a critical estimation that is drawn with the help of conversation intelligence.
5. Help received from other teams to handle objections
- The few cases of objections stalling deals towards the closure can be eliminated. A communication channel created from the voice of the customer to the product development and customer success team can help.
- This ensures the prospect objections are addressed, and upgrades and updates are applied using feedback from the customer.
With the help of conversation intelligence and AI, a buyer’s vision is identified and surfaced for the sales rep to take action. If relevant, the solution could also help the buyer achieve the identified intent.
Deal acceleration is just a result of the Account Executive's understanding of the buyer’s expectation through listening and probing. AI insights that have surfaced through a series of engagements will act as a fulcrum that aids deal closures.
Let's conclude by discussing what buyers want?
According to Forrester’s Research- "Personalization will be key in the future of sales. Buyer journeys will be hyper-personalized and consistent at every touchpoint throughout the customer lifecycle. Sales leaders will need to enable their teams with personalized coaching (leveraging insights from AI) and tools to personalize customer interactions and content."
Today, the average rep spends only 23% of their time on core, direct engagement selling activities — not very productive. In the future, organizations will differentiate themselves based on their ability to maximize sales productivity. Time-consuming, administrative tasks will be rooted out and automated to free reps time. Reps can spend more time selling and working towards their quotas. And this is where automation and human EQ come into play.
The path to Personalization starts with conversation intelligence insights. A data-driven sales team can offer tailored messaging and a personalized experience.
So, I want to delve deeper into Conversational Intelligence software. How about a free sales analytics experience?
Results first, payment later.
