Continuous improvement of your sales reps is critical to achieving higher sales effectiveness, increased close rates and higher revenue.
No one can deny the fact.
Still, more than 50% of sales reps rely on their peers & network for improvement, reveals the study from HubSpot.
While this is a great way to learn, it is not standardized and not scalable. Worse, all the sales reps end up committing the same set of mistakes.
No doubt most of the sales team struggle for performance.
Well, conversation analytics can benefit sales teams learn faster, and much beyond.
Let’s explore how.
What is conversation intelligence?
Conversation intelligence is the process of converting conversations into meaningful and actionable insights to enable data driven decision making.
At the core, conversation intelligence helps you understand the gist of interactions happening day to day between your company agents and the outside world.
The essence is to draw out operational information that can help you improve the effectiveness & outcome of these conversations.
While conversation analytics finds a use across multiple functions within an organization, it’s highly effective within the sales teams.
Why is conversation intelligence essential for sales teams?
We all quantify & track our sales metrics religiously: starting from the annual revenue targets right till the daily calls made by the sales rep.
That’s good, but have you ever wondered what happens after the call connects?
Are the agents following the sales scripts?
What separates your best agent from the mediocre ones?
Can you draw behavioral insights to coach the under performers? Is the under performance of an agent co-related to his poor choice of language?
Questions like these and more haunt even the best of the organizations.
No matter how deep the pockets, it’s practically impossible to dip into each call for quality assurance.
The best a QA can do is sample a part of the conversations (generally 15-20% of the calls made), leaving the major chunk aside.
That’s where the benefits of conversation analytics for sales comes into picture.
Without listening to even a single call, sales managers now know the quality of interactions their reps are making with the customers.
This becomes a critical input to correct and improve agent performance.
In short, conversation intelligence tools surface the call issues within no time so that you can focus your QA attention where it matters the most. This results in faster feedback, better coaching and improved learning.
Let’s understand some benefits of conversation analytics for sales teams.
7 conversation intelligence benefits for sales teams
1. Faster quality assurance
As per a research, more than 66% contact centers fail to measure even 6 calls per agent per month.
Quality monitoring at contact centers is still a manual operation that demands time and investment. Most of the setups don’t have formal sales coaches, and those who do, have their plates full.
In such scenarios, it’s either peer to peer quality assurance or random sampling of the calls.
The former is not a great way to improve performance (due to lack of standardization) while the latter leaves so much behind on the table.
Conversation analytics helps you achieve faster QA by surfacing those calls that need urgent attention, without listening to even a single call.
While the role of a human still exists, the time is now spent listening to the calls where an issue actually exists (rather than listening to random calls).
2. 100% coverage
As I mentioned above, no matter how much you try, your call quality experts can’t listen to 100% of the sales calls.
At the same time, the best in class sales teams perform quality assessment of 100% of their calls against multiple, predefined parameters & scripts.
This can happen only when you have a conversation analytics platform like Enthu in place.
A computer listens, understands and analyzes the entire call log to derive insights & analysis, that too basis the standards you have set for your reps.
This assures 100% call coverage across all the agents, leaving no unchartered or grey spaces within your calling team.
3. Reduce compliance & risk issues
Do you risk penalties because an agent missed a mandatory disclosure specified by a regulatory agency?
As an example, a failure to disclose material information can attract civil penalties upto $16,000 per instance, as per the Telemarketing Sales Rules (TSR) released by the FTC, USA.
These fines skyrocket as you move from general guidelines to industry specific guidelines (e.g. healthcare, insurance, banking etc.).
The question that remains unanswered is: Do your sales agents provide the right information, or are they providing too much or too less an information that can cost the company its business?
This remains a mystery till your quality person lands on such a call. And that’s the problem with random QA.
But not if you have a conversation analytics platform set for your sales team. Catch all such costly mistakes right when they occur.
Conversation analytics transcribes all the sales calls automatically and runs deep analysis to find regulatory and compliance issues.
All your reps get marked against defined scripts, thus ensuring 100% adherence to what’s necessary.
4. Benchmark agents
You can’t improve what you don’t measure.
Therefore, knowing your agent performance level and benchmarking it becomes increasingly important for sales success.
For example, what’s the average call length of your best reps vs. the mediocre ones. Is the variance too huge? Are successful reps using a specific set of words in each call? What other patterns emerge out?
Conversation analytics help you set benchmarks across parameters, based on the real call data without the need to do any dripping.
5. Understand winning behaviors
Do you know what behaviors, conversations and language patterns separate your best performing agents from the under performers?
As I mentioned above, conversation analytics help you evaluate agents against the set standards and identify what the best agents are doing.
Maybe they are opening the calls in a different manner, or they are asking the questions that result in more selling opportunities.
Whatever it is, you need to know the winning behavior and ensure others are following it too within the sales team.
6. Coach reps
With tools like Enthu, you can easily identify the call journey of your agents.
You can identify the coaching areas and work specifically towards that.
For example, a particular agent may be doing everything right, except explaining the product features well.
Analyzing the calls using conversation analytics will surface this issue.
As a result, you don’t need to coach the rep end to end. Just fix the part that is broken and you have a super sales rep.
7. Drive cost savings
Implementing a conversation analytics platform in sales directly impacts the bottom line.
Not only do the sales team execute faster QA, they can catch costly mistakes well within time and coach reps faster and better.
All these measures ensure you spend less while achieving more.
Conclusion
Conversation analytics revolutionizes the way sales teams approach revenue performance.
There are multiple benefits of implementing such a solution, right from better sales performance to better quality checks to reduced costs and improved target hits.
As a sales leader, if call quality adherence is your continuous challenge, it’s time for you to explore Enthu for your sales team.
Tushar Jain is the CEO and Founder of Enthu.ai. In this free time he loves to read books.
