Conversation Intelligence: What It Is and How It Improves Productivity Among Sales Reps

"It’s not about having the right opportunities. It’s about handling the opportunities right." -Mark Hunter.

Sales leaders enjoy opportunities coming from all directions. They employ the best reps to lead the conversation yet can’t deal with it efficiently.

Some opportunities are wasted, while others are not nurtured perfectly. 

Despite the best sales tools and skilled sales force, many firms struggle to work on opportunities as well as they might have desired.

The observation is simple. 

Even after hiring and investing in the best of employees and tools, sales leaders get slack at sales coaching, resulting in poor sales productivity. 

Sounds familiar? No?

All right, Let’s try to answer the following questions:

1. Do you spend time with reps after a sales call?
2. Do you provide any quantitative and qualitative feedback to your sales reps?
3. Do you have a sales productivity dashboard?
4. Have you been able to get your hands on sales conversation analysis?
5. Do you keep track of sales recordings for review and feedback?

You may or may not be performing all the above activities up till now. It’s vaguely possible that sales coaching isn’t a priority for your sales team. You may not have a structured process around coaching.

But all that’s going to change with conversation intelligence: your answer to effective sales coaching.

What is Conversation Intelligence for Sales?

Using conversation intelligence, firms are becoming better equipped to coach and enable sales teams. And CI software does the work so efficiently because it leverages Artificial Intelligence to offer meaningful insights to the sales reps and higher management.

Conversation intelligence software is an AI-backed platform that uses machine learning to offer valuable insights from sales conversation recordings on a phone or video call. The software is capable of recording, transcribing, and analyzing sales conversations. 

The valuable insights from the conversation intelligence tool help sales teams learn about the customer and gain industry know-how.

The knowledge gathered in the call is an excellent asset and demands immediate call recording and saving. Additionally, these conversations contain;

• Quantitative feedback, 
• Competitor’s update, 
• Market movement, 
• Trending pain areas, 
• Common objections, 
• And plenty of surprise elements.
  

The most significant advantage that a CI tool can offer is that it gives you an integrated view of your sales deals and accounts. The probability of catching multiple improvement areas and hitting more sales opportunities becomes high with Conversational Intelligence.

Now, let’s dig deeper and identify how Conversation Intelligence impacts the productivity of sales reps.

6 functionalities of a Conversation Intelligence software that supports Productivity Improvement of Sales Reps

1. Records & Transcribes all meetings

‍The primary role of a conversation intelligence tool is to record and transcribe the call conversation to the T. The transcription quality of the conversation matters a great deal because it reduces the review time of lengthy conversations. An excellent example of a recorded call transcription can be viewed in the image below:

The recorded calls are shared with stakeholders for further review and analysis.

2. Call Performance Statistics 

Data analytics has transformed sales conversations, and organizations spend more time and money on sales analytics than intuition and guesswork.

At Convin, call analytics offers out of the box simple call statistics:

• Talk ratio, 
• Longest rep monologue, 
• Longest customer monologue, 
• Patience, 
• Question rate,
• And Interactivity.
  

3. Personalized Call Review Questionnaire

Sales conversation review is incomplete without a structured feedback mechanism. 

In CI tools, you can configure a customized feedback questionnaire corresponding to a script to perform better conversation analytics. 

Typically, a sales coach or manager is responsible for answering call performance review questions; the results report on the sales representative's performance. 

4. Keyword Based Navigation

Keyword analysis is an excellent feature. 

Using keyword analysis to improve navigation can be beneficial to sellers looking for easy navigation software. Keyword analysis highlights critical topics throughout the call. 

Keywords also make jumping directly to the critical areas of conversations easier. Managers can jump to the exact time in the call using the keyword spoken at that moment.

With the help of filters, coaches can access call transcripts by filtering them down using keywords, queries, actionable items, discussion topics, and more.‍

5. Summarizes the Call

Conversation intelligence makes a lot of room for core-sales activities while building call notes that summarize the;

1. Topics Discussed
   

2. Action Items

3. Call notes 

4. Competitor discussed
5. Overall sentiment of customer
   

5. Access Sales Playbook

Organizations can invest in building helpful sales playbooks leveraging the call recordings. Different scenarios such as pricing discussion, negotiation, or objection handling can be covered.

Sales playbook supports the process of sales coaching to a large extent. The automatic creation of playbooks reduces additional effort and resource time.

Organizations can specifically create a playbook for their new employees, especially for your sales new hires. These playbooks could be a mix of:

• Product demo, 
• Sales pitch,
• Crisp Organization brief,
• Sales presentation skills,
• And best objection handling

How can you exploit conversation Intelligence to coach and ramp up your sales team?

Leveraging a conversation intelligence platform makes sales coaching a repeatable, reliable, and remarkable sales process. But that’s not all.

According to a study, an AE tenures 2.7 years on the same job but uses around 4.7 months to ramp up. Our purpose in mentioning the figure is to illustrate that every executive has a cost. The four months of training should further reduce to utilize maximum time within the 2.7 years. 

And you’ll be amazed to know your sales team can save up to 60% ramp-up time by incorporating conversation intelligence software in sales. You can ensure maximum utilization of the training period. 

With innovative sales coaching software, you can expect a dramatic reduction in ramp-up time and an increase in productivity. To achieve the results, here are a few ways to use the conversation intelligence software to its full potential:

• Performance review and feedback
  
  Call coaching starts with a conversation performance evaluation on the CI tool. Managers can identify the gaps once the call stats and feedback are added to the software and start working. 
  
  For example, some reps stammer while handling price negotiations and product objections. Managers can listen to the conversations and help the individual representatives understand the issue better, and assist them in doing it better next time.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
  

• Sort low performers out of the lot
  
  One of the value additions of Conversation Intelligence software is analyzing performance and separating the low performers from the top performers.
  
  The identification process primarily helps;
  

1. Pinpointing the ideal and most effective conversation techniques. Benchmarking the calls for coaching.
2. Evaluating the sales coaching methods effectiveness and gaps.
3. Sales reps perform the best and might do better with some additional practice.
   

• Personalized selling
  ‍
  It’s easy to get lost in routine calls and product demos, leading to the same collaterals being shared with all prospects. 
  
  Effective sales coaching using the CI tool:
  

1. Ensures more reps offer personalized offers in terms of product solutions and pricing.
2. Coaching at the right time helps reps prepare and send tailored presentations and proposals.
3. Follow-up emails can be drafted based on the previous customer conversation. 
4. All documents shared with prospects must take into account the prospect’s pain point.
   

• Persona Research
  
  Conversations with new leads and prospects can help to understand the target audience better. The sales calls are the most reliable source of truth in learning more about the buyer and user persona. 
  
  Sales coaches and marketers can harness the conversations in creating a detailed user profile for better sales and marketing efforts. 
  
  Coaches can build persona-specific mock calls on the conversation intelligence tool and store them for newcomers in the company.
  

• Improve follow-up calls
  
  Seasoned sales associates are better at following up with prospects. Don’t ask why.
  
  But what’s important is their experience needs to get disseminated to other members of the firm too.
  
  Sales coaches must plug into some sales calls and coach the particular rep on:
  

1. How to respond to the participants?
2. What’s the right time and occasion to respond?
3. Which collaterals need to reach the users?
4. What should be the messaging?

‍

• Learn Market Trend Updates
  
  Sales conversations are not only useful for understanding the target market better but also give market trend insights.
  
  For example, a buyer from a pharmaceutical company can explain the root problems in their marketing team and highlight what happens in other pharma companies marketing units- standard processes, tools, team structure, and strategies. The information is enough to gauge and locate gaps as well as search opportunities.
  

• Navigate to Sales Playbook
  
  Sales coaching doesn’t end with the above points. A crucial point of coaching is storing all the coachable information in a secure repository.
  
  The sales playbook will store all best practices gathered by the sales managers and seasoned reps. Both new and old reps can benefit from the sales playbook set up.
  
  Without a doubt, conversation intelligence software is the perfect choice to improve the productivity of your sales team. But besides coaching, the CI software is highly instrumental in few exceptional areas:
  

1. Gaining marketing insights
2. Customer service support
3. Internal knowledge sharing 
4. Internal meetings and note-taking
   

If you’re reading this post by now, you must be impressed with the functionalities of conversational intelligence. So now, it’s time to experience the capabilities first-hand without paying a penny- Sign Up Now!