Every sales team at any organization has one step in their sales process where they have to call the client. The call journey may begin from a cold call, or it might be a discovery callc to qualify the lead (both inbound or outbound) or if you are lucky (wink wink) it might be an actual sales call to discuss the offerings.
With the technology coming in and B2B companies growing at a record-breaking pace, sales teams are trying to get the most out of their clients. And to help the sales team, multiple tools and software have been developed. But what we need is a seamless process that reduces human effort and makes our work easy.
So before you ask how we can do that, let’s talk about measuring the sales performance.
Measuring the performance model for sales
The sales team has been grinding hard to get you more closures YoY. The important factors for calculating the Sales KPI and performance can be -The total time spent in selling, lead response time, Customer Acquisition Cost, etc.
These are perfect ways to measure the sales performances but are these measures enough? Even with All-in-one tools like Hubspot and PropellerCRM, there are a lot of things that we miss out to track from the sales team.
- The time taken to coach the new sales member.
- With the same sales pitch, why do the teams not perform equally?
- Why does the team fail to close more deals?
Even the sales managers and leaders fail to answer these questions. So when things do not work efficiently, they try to rehire and iterate on the sales target.
So how do we solve this problem?
Well, it was always there. Before your eyes! You need to just stop and see it.
Your Sales Conversations.
Get more insights from your sales Sales Conversations
When things go south, you want to know the reason for that. So you dig deep and start with insights on sales conversations. Looking at your sales records will make you understand where the leakage is. Sales managers access the video calls, webinars, demo calls, etc that these sales reps have completed.
But sales managers and team leads do not have time to listen to every call that sales reps have made. This will increase the human efforts and the entire process will be time-consuming. And we started this article by mentioning that the process should be so easy that the human efforts are minimized.
But again, how do we solve this problem then? Well, we answer this right here.
Conversation Intelligence.
Okay! So what is this new thing? Let us help you understand.
What exactly is Conversation Intelligence?
As the name suggests, conversation intelligence, in general, is the insights that we receive from the conversations that happen between sales reps and the clients across different mediums like Email, Call, Video, Webinar, etc.
The conversation intelligence technology gives you insights on the verbal or written communication with your clients about the direction in which conversation is headed so that necessary actions can be taken.
As leaders, we regularly talk to our representative about what did they discuss with the client on call, how can we improve it, where did it go wrong, etc. These discussions are subjective and suggestions are generally qualitative. But as we know, we can’t improve until we measure.
Conversation intelligence is the evolved and structured form of this discussion. It gives you quantifiable objective metrics to measure and improve conversations. This is different from conversation analysis because “analysis” just refers to the data points while intelligence refers to actionable insights.
So who can use the Conversation Intelligence technology?
Depending on the organization size, niche, location, etc, we have listed the below experts for whom this technology works best.
For Sales Leaders
Conversation intelligence can help sales leaders to understand the reason why their sales deal failed. Or also point out if something is not going well in a deal that may hit your revenue targets. It will also help them to see which sales rep needs to be coached more.
For Sales Managers
Sales managers are responsible for motivating and advising their reps to improve their performance, as well as training them.
Using Conversation Intelligence, It will help them to replicate the best rep in the team and close more deals. Just imagine, what if we clone the entire sales conversation of the top-performing sales rep of your team? The closures will skyrocket, right?
For Sales Reps
Sales representatives can use conversation intelligence to see what the best performing reps are doing differently and what they need to work on. In the competitive world of sales, you don’t want to miss out on any of the pointers that will take you away from your targets.
How does Conversation Intelligence help?
From the above pointers, we know the problem exists. So now let’s understand how this technology will benefit and help us.
1. Engaging conversations
If we understand the importance of how certain behaviors and discussions can lead to more engaging conversations, that will help your team close more deals.
A large part of closing a deal depends on how the conversation has shaped out between the sales reps and the client.
2. Find what works with clients
Conversation intelligence can help teams to find out which content is working on calls and which is not. Once you know that, it becomes super easy for you to blend your sales pitch accordingly and make better use of time during your calls.
3. Behavioral Dynamics
The behavioral dynamics will help you find what type of rep behavior drives most conversions. Once you have this data in the form of clear metrics, you can make sure that your team is following it tightly on calls and winning deals.
4. Market Intelligence
Salespeople are closest to the market and they talk to the customers daily. Conversation intelligence can help you derive what is happening in the market which becomes most important to plan out your marketing and product strategies.
5. Forecasting
With the use of Conversation Intelligence, when you have all the records and insights, it becomes very easy to forecast.
You already know your areas of improvement. Organizations can predict revenue, team performance, quarterly targets, etc.
For the sales team, forecasting will help them look ahead and predict their sales targets easily.
6. Onboarding the new joiners
Onboarding is a lengthy and time-consuming process. When you have a new joiner, be it a trainee or an experienced rep, you will have to spend a lot of time in making them understand the process and your culture.
The conversation Intelligence tool can act as a catalyst by increasing the process further as you already have the sales records and activities with you.
Moreover, it will also help in building a personalized sales playbook which will be very useful for them.
All you need to do is ask the new member to get a headphone and listen to the conversations.
What can we expect from Conversation Intelligence Technology?
With the problems we see in the current B2B sales, we expect a lot of clarity and visibility from the Conversation Intelligence technology.
Since the records that we have from the sales teams are unorganized, the CI technology with the help of Artificial Intelligence helps to make the data organized for easy understanding.
When this is done, the call logs need to be processed and for that purpose, the Natural Language Processing ( NLP) helps in analyzing the transcripts.
Let’s say that the sales manager of an X organization has 5 sales reps that help in the sales process. The manager cannot be around always and he can’t listen to every call the reps have made. So using Conversation Technology they can check things like:
1. Sales Pitch
If the sales rep uses the same sales pitch that has been given to him or does he improvise the pitch. You can also A/B test the sales pitch.
2. Exact Keyword Analysis
Manager can filter the call records and analyze that during the sales call when the rep is discussing the competitor product, does he use the word Pricing? He can also set a situation where, if the above metric is not followed, an Email or an SMS will be triggered to him.
3. Sales Narration.
When you are on a call with the customer, you don’t want to push it too hard and sell your product. Understand the pain point of the customer, his problems, and then finally give him a solution that gives answers to all of his queries.
With the advancement in technologies like Conversation Intelligence, we get a lot of clarity on how the sales rep talks on the calls, is their conversation two ways, etc.
4. The Art of patience
If there would be any rulebook for sales calls, being patient would top the rules list.
You as a customer, you never want to talk to a salesperson who does not listen.
If he does not empathize with your problems, then the conversation does not move ahead. Tools like Convin help in understanding the Talk-Ratio along with the art of being patient.
Conversation Intelligence can analyze the calls and tell you that the sales rep was patient or not during the entire discussion
5. Call length
There is no clear answer to this. But with the CI technology, you can analyze the records and with the help of Artificial Intelligence, predict the length that is apt for any sales call.
How Conversation Intelligence is different from Call Analytics
Any organization that has an Outbound Sales team and does a lot of Cold calling, uses call analytics for tracking their activities.
It gives large chunks of data like the duration of the call, a total number of calls made, when was the call placed, length of the calls, call location, etc.
Call analytics is more of data mining, where you need someone who manually can take out these details and share them with the seniors for better understanding.
Though call analytics is an important and essential feature, do you think it is enough?
Now, on the other hand, Conversation Intelligence Tools not only give you insights from the call records, but they share the actionable data with us. With the use of Artificial Intelligence, you get actual semantics of the call.
It also turns the fetched data from the records and changes it into actionable data.
Sales managers can use this data to coach and train their sales reps better as they have all the details, along with the data.
If we put this in simple words, call analytics can give the quality of the records and some of the analysis that has been done on it.
But with Conversation Intelligence you get to scale your customer call experience and creates a room for progressive behaviors.
If you keep using the old school techniques and do not move with the new technology, the competitors will make use of this and your revenues will take a hit soon.
Conclusion
Sales records and activities are a great source of insight. But without a Conversation Intelligence tool like Convin, these insights are dust. All the salespeople would agree that these calls have extremely valuable data that goes unused. The main reason being that it’s impossible to go through all these calls manually & derive insights.
Even with the best CRM and analytic tool, getting the information from them is just unreal. But let us understand this keenly that to improve the sales and scale at x speed, every sales manager and leader need to coach their team based on the things they lack. Once we have the technology and leadership team together, the revenue generation and scaling at X speed will become easy.
Convin is one such solution that helps sales leaders with extremely useful insights on sales calls and keeps building the most relevant learning material for the sales staff.
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