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For anyone managing a sales team, reaching the sales quota is the ultimate goal.
Therefore hitting that number is what matters most in B2B sales, and reaching the sales goals is a sign that your team is performing at its best. Conversation Intelligence is one of the tools that can help sales managers and organisations transform themselves in the coming future.
As per a FMI report, the global conversation intelligence software market is projected to reach US$ 43.2 Billion in 2032, exhibiting a 7.2% CAGR from 2022-2032.
Today’s sales managers face tremendous pressure to achieve ambitious targets. Now more than ever, leaders need to up their game to increase productivity. But the reality is that over half of all sellers miss their quota in an average year. And this year has been anything but average.
The key questions to answer for any sales manager are,
- How can you help your sales reps perform better?
- How can you understand where they’re falling short
- Why are they making these missteps, and how to help them improve?
- How can you enable every rep to be their best every single day?
The answer is a Conversation Intelligence platform—a software tool that uses data to help sales teams make better decisions.
What is Conversation Intelligence?
Conversation Intelligence uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to record, transcribe, and analyze sales calls and generate recommendations—powering not just coaching, but every aspect of sales enablement with data-driven insights into individual and team performance.
With Conversation Intelligence, sales teams can use analytics and insights from actual customer conversations to power team enablement, gain deeper visibility into impact, and turn insights into action by analyzing and coaching to recorded sales calls with AI assistance.
Sales leaders can use individual and aggregate data to unlock the next level of actionable intelligence and smart recommendations for sellers—informing next best actions across training, content, and selling.
Conversation intelligence is the technology used to identify insights from prospect and sales conversations, done with the aim of helping sales reps improve their overall processes and quality of customer calls. Conversation intelligence can allow salespeople to bring up the most relevant points during a conversation while ensuring they have the right information they need to understand customer intent.
Conversation intelligence today can also include so much more than plain call analytics solutions. AI-powered meeting tools that provide action items for future customer conversations can help optimize sales messaging and efforts for instance.
In the B2B sales environment, it is common for sales teams to struggle with long-winded buying cycles. Real-time insights about the prospect’s current state of mind or purchase journey can allow sales teams to improve how they time and build agendas for customer meetings.
Conversation intelligence features can enhance a sales team’s output and helps in streamlining their whole prospecting game.
Why Conversation Intelligence?
The Challenge: So Many Reps, So Little Time
Today’s sales organizations face a perfect storm of challenges. The workplace has been upended. Many companies are returning to a hybrid virtual and in-person situation.
In this new world, reps can’t always collaborate, overhear each other, or trade ideas easily. Managers face time constraints, reduced visibility into seller activity, and restructured work environments that make personalized coaching even more difficult than it was before.
In a perfect world, listening to a 30-minute discovery call to provide feedback to a single sales rep is no sweat. But scaling that up by a factor of 10 or 20—or more—is downright impossible.
In fact, 47% of all sales managers spend less than 30 minutes per week coaching their reps, according to CSO Insights.
Meanwhile, salespeople who miss quota say they aren’t getting enough training, they lack formal coaching support, and they need more training on how to communicate value to customers.
Clearly, salespeople who aren’t coached or trained properly find it more difficult to attain quota. With Conversation Intelligence, sales teams have the tool they need to help every single rep be productive every single day.
Here are a few top benefits of conversation intelligence to modern day B2B sales teams:
Boosts Sales Rep and Customer Onboarding Processes
If used correctly, conversation intelligence tools can enable a better customer and sales onboarding process. For customers: insights drawn from their conversations with sales during the purchasing stage can be used to further customize the end-to-end onboarding process.
For new sales reps: insights and recordings from previous sales calls can be used to train new team executives. A sales rep’s onboarding that involves learning data based on actual sales conversations and how they played out can allow them to pick up pieces of the puzzle a lot earlier in their role.
AI powered systems that prompt sellers with the relevant talking points at the right time can lead to quicker training processes, making new sales reps fit to sit in on actual conversations sooner, this allows sales managers to save time on these sessions and focus on other critical areas.
Inadequate onboarding for new sales reps can lead to lost revenue, using the right tools and data to quicken the onboarding and training process while still inculcating the right learning points effectively in them can be useful in the long run.
Drives Sales Productivity
Most conversation intelligence platforms have call analytics features to allow sales teams visibility into call performance when they review them at a later stage, this also allows sales managers to assess the team calls to identify problem areas earlier on in the sales cycle.
Some sophisticated tools offer other features like transcriptions and notes, even post call summaries that can be handy to sales teams. These prompts help sales and customer facing teams pick up where an earlier conversation left off, identify and use the right triggers to achieve a goal in a future conversation and build a more personalized process that can reduce the buying journey on the whole.
Enables Data Driven Processes
One of the main goals for any sales leader is to limit the amount of data silos or disparate systems. Conversation intelligence when integrated with other existing systems can allow sales teams to have insights delivered straight to their inbox with it also being updated in the central CRM.
When set up to deliver more insights on customers and prospects, these systems can enrich the scope of customer data all customer facing and revenue teams like sales, customer success and account management can find useful.
Coach more effectively and at scale
Every sales leader understands that consistent growth is driven by sales coaching and feedback therefore it is critical to understand how important it is to train and coach the sales team with the right tools and technology..
The traditional go-to method for sales coaching was shadowing your sales reps on their sales calls. However this is not a scalable method in the long term.
Also, coaching isn’t all that you do as a sales manager. With sales conversation intelligence software, you can get the highlights of hundreds of calls made by your entire team and you can identify what your star performers are doing right and where others are lagging. You’ll know if your sales rep needs to work on building rapport, customer research, product knowledge, or just needs to be more confident.
Help your average performers learn from your best performing ones
We all love awesome sales stories and if there’s a winning sales formula, why not use it to the maximum.
Sales teams love a repeatable, winning strategy for a successful sales call. By analyzing the calls of your top performers, you can derive a sales action plan to share with your average and low-performing sales reps. Based on your analysis through your conversation intelligence platform, you can select the most inspiring success stories and ask the sales reps to share their customer interaction experiences. This will help highlight some of the toughest sales challenges, objections and what are the smartest ways to tackle them.
Refine your sales playbook and overall strategy
If your current sales strategy isn’t resonating with your desired sales revenue, then it’s time to ramp it up with a Conversation intelligence tool.
With sales transcription and AI-driven analysis of call recordings, you can circle the key, game-changing points, as well as the losing ones. Here’s a snapshot of what you’ll get as intelligent sales insights:
- Pain points of your prospects
- Best objection handling techniques
- Buyer persona and behaviour
- Critical sales moments gone wrong (and why)
- Competitors that you’re up against
With this information on hand, you can revamp your sales strategy to focus on your customer’s needs and how to solve them, anticipate objections, understand your buyer’s mindset, and create a plan for differentiating yourself from your competitors.
Identifying and understanding prospect’s needs
One of the most important aspects of any sales conversation is to first identify your prospects’ pain points and express that you understand their needs while engaging with them.
With conversation intelligence software, you can then listen to your calls and identify pain points that you can specifically address in follow ups.
The best way to engage with prospects and get them interested in your product or service is by customising your pitch and addressing exactly what they need.
Who Benefits From Conversation Intelligence?
Although insights from customer conversations helps every team, however the revenue focussed teams can leverage these insights from conversational intelligence the most in their day-to-day sales process for sales team leaders and sales reps.
Sales team leaders and Managers
For any sales organization, sales leaders must know how to manage and coach both high performers and bottom performers.
The job, though, sometimes becomes challenging to coach middle-performers, which consists of the majority of the team.
The end goal for all sales coaches and managers is to transform average performing reps into high-performers and promote team selling.
But, analyzing hundreds of sales calls across the sales team is challenging and extremely time-consuming.
A conversation intelligence platform for sales makes it possible.
Conversational intelligence enables you to easily oversee top performers, reps who are struggling, and ones who need an extra push with the right style of sales coaching. The software also helps you to understand the talk tracks of top-performing salespersons.
Sales Reps
Sales reps can greatly benefit from conversational intelligence.
Right from being more focused on conversations by listening more to asking the right questions to avoid mundane tasks such as note-taking and feeding in data, this sales technology is highly beneficial.
With MeetRecord’s meeting and conversation intelligence, reps can tackle customer objections like a pro. Reps can now know how top reps handle tricky situations, and share best practices across the team in real-time. With MeetRecord’s keyword detection engine, the reps can determine what’s important for a prospect and adjust the talking points accordingly in future calls. Not just that, they can know the purchase intent of the prospect, and target only those leads with high chances of conversion with personalized messages.
Never miss out on the opportunity to close deals because you were too consumed with mundane tasks. Instead, focus more on the prospect, and understand what went wrong and what went right in a meeting.
Should you power your sales tech stack with a conversation intelligence solution?
Conversation intelligence can be used in many ways, it can allow sales managers to identify problem areas in sales calls, it can offer talk tracks for future learning or improvements, it can enrich the data sales and marketing teams collect on their prospects and customers.
These tools serve their benefit in more ways than one when integrated into central processes and sales, customer success systems. Conversation intelligence platforms can empower multiple teams in an organization, from product marketing people to other customer facing teams like customer success, account management etc..
Interested in a Conversational Intelligence Platform that Can Actually Help?
If you are looking for a solution that helps with actionable insights, and sales coaching, improves reps’ productivity, and goes beyond just recording meetings, MeetRecord is the platform you are looking for.
MeetRecord can not only record and transcribe conversations but fully understand the customer’s intent such via keywords, questions asked and their implication, and pay-off to personalize the pitch.
Help your sales team win more deals and supercharge your revenue engine with MeetRecord with human-like intelligence and cater better to your customers.
Book a demo with our expert to see how conversational intelligence works and activate your sales team to win deals faster.