Conversation intelligence is a concept that helps business leaders know their audience better and deliver a great customer experience.
Until now, most of the sales leaders measure their sales effort basis: the number of calls made by the reps, the answer rate, stage of the deal, revenue projection, deals won or lost; and so on.
No doubt this is critical sales input data but it misses an important piece of the puzzle.
What else can be done to improve the sales outcome and build a rockstar sales team?
This question can be answered if sales leaders know what happens after the call gets connected; something that has been missing from the sales purview till now.
Enters conversation intelligence – a sales toolkit for KPI driven sales leaders that revolutionizes the way sales leaders can oversee and improve the performance of their sales team, enabling them to hit higher sales revenue faster.
A. What is Conversation Intelligence?
Conversation intelligence refers to the business insights derived from the day to day conversations that your people make with your customers & prospects.
There can be multiple mediums over which such customer conversations happen – call, video, email, chat etc.
Conversation intelligence helps you analyze this data and get meaningful information out of it.
This is something which gets ignored by most of the companies.
For example, the majority of the sales leaders ask their reps to write meeting notes after the call.
Since this is a manual process, there’s a lot of information that gets missed.
Moreover, if you have a QA or a sales coaching team, they would just sample calls and give feedback on top of that sample.
Deploying conversation intelligence assures every call gets “heard” by the machine, intelligence drawn out from it and insights provided to the decision makers for improving the sales performance.
Thus, conversation intelligence uses computer driven models to literally listen to the conversations, derive analysis and offer actionable insights to build rockstar sales teams.
B. Use cases of Conversation Intelligence
a. For sales leaders
Conversation intelligence for sales leaders enables them to get a single view of all the customer interactions made by the sales rep.
Sales leaders can identify the winning conversations, new customer trends and successful sales reps.
The most important benefit for sales leaders include identification and setting the sales process benchmarks, at the same time vetting the reps against the best practices.
In short, conversation intelligence helps sales leaders take data backed decisions to improve the performance of their sales team and help them hit their quotas.
b. For sales coaches
The role of a sales coach is probably the most hectic and challenging one in the entire sales team.
Their job entails shadowing calls and listening to them minutely to deliver coaching recommendations.
This is how sales coaching has been done since decades. Unfortunately, this process is both inefficient and non scalable.
Conversation intelligence can pinpoint those conversations that need your attention.
As a sales coach, that helps you focus your attention and effort towards fixing the weak behaviors and replicating the winning ones.
c. For sales managers
As a sales manager, your role is to enable your sales rep to reach their peak performance.
Conversation intelligence enables you to identify your mediocre reps and the gaps in their sales conversations, without the need to listen to even a single call.
You can hand hold the mediocre agents, at the same time make them replicate the conversations and scripts of your top selling agents.
That way, you can enable your sales team to win and close more deals.
d. For sales reps
There are multiple benefits of conversation intelligence for the sales reps.
First, they can focus on selling rather than taking notes. Each call is transcribed, tagged and available in your CRM for listening.
Next, conversation intelligence facilitates a learning environment where each rep can see themself against the benchmark.
They can listen to calls of the best agent, identify their own gaps and work towards improvement.
Since there is intelligence available for each call, reps don’t need to filter through multiple calls.
They can pick the winning calls/agents, deep dive and emulate them for better outcomes.
C. Benefits of Conversation Intelligence
a. Complete coverage
Existing methods to evaluate rep conversations are based on random sampling and can never offer 100% coverage.
The best sales teams listen to no more than 20% of the rep conversations.
With conversation intelligence software in place, sales coaches & QA teams can monitor all the customer conversations, without even listening to even a single call.
That way, they can focus their attention and time on coaching the agents and training outcomes, not on just listening to some random calls.
b. Benchmarking & evaluation
You can use conversation intelligence to identify benchmarks related to call quality.
You can see the agents that are meeting the call quality benchmark and those who are not.
Benchmarking always has a direct impact on the sales outcome, and you can use it to evaluate the reps as well.
Generally, your best reps are the ones who are consistently exceeding the benchmark.
c. Behavioral analytics
What separates the winning agent from the mediocre ones?
Perhaps they handle client objections in a better way? Or maybe, they ask intelligent questions that makes the sale easier?
Whatever it is, this generally remains a guesswork for the sales leader.
Conversation intelligence can help surface and identify such winning and losing behaviors, enabling you to fix the losing one and replicating the winning one across the sales team.
d. Effective sales coaching
Conversation intelligence brings effectiveness within the sales coaching process.
Rather than wasting time listening to random calls, sales coaches now hear conversations where a problem has been detected by the tool.
They can directly jump to those parts of the conversation that are marked by the software, thus saving a lot of time.
e. Faster agent onboarding
With conversation intelligence by your side, your agents can onboard and get productive 3 times faster.
You can show them the winning behaviors and how it results in better sales outcomes.
You don’t need to listen to every single call these reps are making.
The conversation intelligence tool does the work for you.
And faster and to the point feedback means faster curse correction and better performance.
f. Cost savings
Deploying a conversation intelligence platform results in cost saving across multiple arenas.
It reduces the call QA time and results in faster feedback cycles. It also helps in faster agent ramp up.
Not just that, it results in catching sales mistakes well within time.
Some of these mistakes can actually cost you money, especially if it lies within the regulatory or legal ambit.
D. What all can Conversation Intelligence monitor?
a. Sales pitch
Most of the sales teams have a script to play during the call.
While the flexibility to deviate from the script depends on the complexity of the sales process, adherence and improving the script is always considered as a winning behavior.
Conversation intelligence can track how far the agents following the script, and you can relate that to sales output.
b. Moment identification
Every sales call has a number of predefined moments.
For example, the first part of the call ideally starts with a salutation, followed by an intro and needs identification & discovery.
This is generally followed up by questions and answers, may be feature discussion, perhaps pricing discussion, and finally an end of the call with the next steps.
Do you know which all moments your sales agent missed (e.g. a message required to be given out by law)? Or did he hit a moment which he shouldn’t have (e.g. disclosing an information that is prohibited by the law)?
Conversation intelligence can mark all the standard moments, plus the sales leaders can define their own moments, custom to their sales process.
c. Keyword analysis
Want to filter calls that are talking about a particular keyword or phrase.
This can be easily done using conversation intelligence.
d. Key call metrics
Do you track critical call metrics like silence ratio, patience score, script compliance, call quality, overall sentiment etc.
If your existing call software doesn’t help you with this information, conversation intelligence definitely can.
E. Conclusion
Conversation data is something that organizations should value a lot.
Unfortunately, it is the most ignored asset by the sales leaders.
That’s because someone needs to listen to conversations to drive meaningful insights and coach the sales reps. And it’s always impossible for a human to listen to all the conversations.
It’s where conversation intelligence software like Enthu can help you monitor conversations, without the need to listen to every single call.
That’s definitely a smart way of improving sales performance.
Tushar Jain is the CEO and Founder of Enthu.ai. In this free time he loves to read books.
