As a sales manager, the ultimate goal is to hit the sales quota. Reaching that number means your team is performing at its best. However, in a B2B sales environment, sales teams often struggle with long-winded buying cycles. With the use of Conversation Intelligence (CI) technology, sales managers and organizations can transform their processes to boost productivity and increase revenue. In this article, we will discuss how CI works, the benefits of using CI technology in B2B sales, and some of the top-rated products available in the market.
What is Conversation Intelligence?
Conversation Intelligence is a software tool that uses data to help sales teams make better decisions. It uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to record, transcribe, and analyze sales calls and generate recommendations. 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.
CI technology is used to identify insights from prospect and sales conversations, with the aim of helping sales reps improve their overall processes and quality of customer calls. In the B2B sales environment, sales teams can 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.
Why Conversation Intelligence?
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. 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. With Conversation Intelligence, sales teams have the tool they need to help every single rep be productive every single day.
Benefits of Using Conversation Intelligence Technology in B2B Sales
Boosts Sales Rep and Customer Onboarding Processes
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. 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. 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
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
With the traditional method of sales coaching being shadowing sales reps on their sales calls, it is not scalable in the long term. However, coaching is not the only responsibility for a sales manager. With sales conversation intelligence software, you can get the highlights of hundreds of calls made by your entire team and identify what your top performers are doing right and where others are falling short. You can find out if a sales rep needs to work on building rapport, customer research, product knowledge, or simply needs to be more confident.
With conversation intelligence, sales teams can focus on improving their performance and making data-driven decisions to optimize their sales efforts. It also allows sales managers to provide effective coaching at scale to every member of the team. Through the software, sales managers can share best practices, talk tracks, and objection handling techniques from top performers to improve the overall performance of the team.
Help Your Average Performers Learn from Your Best Performing Ones
In sales, having a repeatable and winning strategy for a successful sales call is highly desirable. 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, it’s time to ramp it up with a conversation intelligence tool. With sales transcription and AI-driven analysis of call recordings, you can pinpoint 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 behavior
- 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 Prospects’ Needs
One of the most important aspects of any sales conversation is identifying your prospects’ pain points and expressing that you understand their needs while engaging with them. With conversation intelligence software, you can 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 customizing your pitch and addressing exactly what they need.
Who Benefits From Conversation Intelligence?
Although insights from customer conversations help every team, revenue-focused 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. Analyzing hundreds of sales calls across the sales team is challenging and extremely time-consuming, but 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.
Conversation Intelligence is an essential tool for sales managers and sales teams. With Conversation Intelligence, sales teams can gain deeper visibility into customer conversations and gain insights that they can use to improve their sales process. The technology can help boost sales reps and customer onboarding processes, drive sales productivity, enable data-driven processes, and coach more effectively and at scale.
In addition to these benefits, Conversation Intelligence can help sales teams refine their sales playbook and overall strategy, identify and understand prospects’ needs, and enable different teams in the organization to gain insights that they can use to improve their performance. With Conversation Intelligence, sales teams can unlock the next level of actionable intelligence and smart recommendations for sellers—informing next best actions across training, content, and selling.
With so many Conversation Intelligence products available in the market, it can be challenging to choose the right one for your organization. However, several top-rated Conversation Intelligence products have excellent customer satisfaction ratings. These products have won the Top Rated award and are based purely on reviews, with no paid placement or analyst opinions influencing the rankings.
Gong, Chorus.ai, Outreach, Salesloft, and Showpad Content are some of the top-rated Conversation Intelligence products that have received high ratings and reviews from customers. Choosing the right Conversation Intelligence product for your organization depends on your specific needs, budget, and business goals.
In conclusion, Conversation Intelligence is a powerful tool that can help sales teams improve their productivity, increase revenue, and coach more effectively at scale. With the help of Conversation Intelligence, sales managers can provide their sales reps with the right tools and insights to enable them to be their best every single day. If you are looking for a solution that helps with actionable insights, sales coaching, improves reps’ productivity, and goes beyond just recording meetings, a Conversation Intelligence product like MeetRecord could be the solution you are looking for.
Further reading:
- Conversation Intelligence: How it helps B2B sales teams across the funnel? – https://www.meetrecord.com/blog/conversation-intelligence-how-it-helps-b2b-sales-teams-across-the-funnel
- Top Rated Conversation Intelligence Products – https://www.trustradius.com/conversation-intelligence
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