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How Do Conversation Intelligence Platforms Work?
Artificial intelligence is progressing rapidly. As a result, the first generation of conversation intelligence and dynamic AI-powered coaching platforms already has outstanding amounts of sales data processing capabilities. Sales leaders use these solutions to record sales calls easily, address customer issues, manage negative feedback about products or services, identify areas of improvement, take notes into a CRM, answer FAQs, detect top competitors mentioned, determine the buying process stage, or see roadblocks in the customer’s journey.
The best conversation intelligence system can capture audio, video, and language data from sales calls. This functionality gives sales leaders science-backed, data-based metrics and insights. The best software can pick up on subtle details your sales managers and coaches might miss, with powerful AI algorithms, like nuances of speech, body movements, and facial expressions.
Through automated listening, audio to text conversion, performance insights, and prediction engines that recommend the following next best action, enhanced conversation intelligence platforms can also track vital metrics such as sentiment analysis, keyword analysis, soft skills, and more in real-time.
Conversation Intelligence’s Case for Sales
Among other functions, conversation intelligence helps managers develop top performers faster. With streamlined call coaching, managers can discover performance patterns and leave feedback on calls at specific times. This technology allows sales leaders to identify information that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Conversation intelligence also allows you to identify, for instance, the signals in a conversation that indicates a prospect's willingness to buy. Salespeople can avoid wasting time on unproductive prospecting by identifying the conversation patterns of a high-quality and low-quality lead early on.
Most importantly, you can move from manual analysis to automated data-driven insights with conversation intelligence. It allows for one-to-one, personalized, on-demand training while challenging lower-performing sales team members to achieve their goals.
Take advantage of the following sales-specific perks if you are a sales leader choosing a conversation AI platform for your team:
- You can understand what customers and prospects have to say, develop sales strategies and make informed training decisions based on precise insights into key phrases or words, brand mentions, competing business mentions, and more.
- By learning more about your top sellers' performance, you can view and compare the sales process in each call to understand how to improve.
- Visible and real-time leadership insights, client or prospect sentiment, and communication style feedback will help you understand your sales reps’ performance at a glance.
Conversation intelligence enhances and automates the monitoring of sales interactions to improve brand awareness while delivering optimal customer satisfaction and increasing sales at scale and fast. As data drives decision-making, the right tools mean the difference between losing hundreds of leads or earning millions in additional revenue.
Consulting firm Ernst & Young states, “Sales leaders wanting to drive revenue must focus their teams on a higher purpose than money. They can direct them to something more meaningful than quarterly sales targets. In the post-COVID-19 market, the sales teams that will win are those that have decided upon their noble purpose to improve the lives of their customers. When viewed through the eyes of the customer, the traditional quota-focused approach to driving sales growth provides little value. A sales team with traditional motivations like ‘hit the number’ sees their customers as objects. Customers quickly become money to be gained rather than people and businesses to be helped.”
Consequently, this is a strategic moment to invest in the sales technology stack so that you can increase sales and serve a greater purpose at the same time. A proactive approach to automatically and precisely identifying conversations that, beyond sales, develop a connection, empathy, and long-term relationships with customers can be a wise decision aimed at growing your team in pandemic times and beyond.
What Are the Main Elements of Conversation Intelligence?
At this point, you might be wondering what conversation intelligence technology can do on a technical level.
According to Deloitte, conversation intelligence is capable of:
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
It enables conversation intelligence platforms to figure out natural sentence structures instead of simple keywords.
Intent Recognition
The software can understand what the user wants and replicate fluid conversations.
Entity Recognition
It understands how a text is related to abstract categories of information. This feature allows it to comprehend and perform analyses on more complex commands.
Fulfilment
Through APIs, the software can get data from web services or databases.
Voice Optimized Responses
This approach involves speaking with an authentic voice and showing emotion in order to optimize the user experience.
Dynamic Text to Speech
It converts written text into a variety of natural-sounding voices in multiple languages, dialects, and accents. Additionally, it can detect capitalization and tonal inflections.
Machine Learning
Machine learning helps improve recognition and the user's experience by assessing human responses and reactions.
Voice Analytics
It examines the vocal patterns that generate positive outcomes beyond just words but the tone and other variables.
Non-Verbals
A key characteristic of top performers is their ability to connect on a human level, including having a presence, eye contact, and facial expressions. AI-powered software can automate this process.
Contextual Awareness
Conversation software can track conversation history, translate, recall, and memorize information.
Suppose one single solution could take all of these features and uniquely combine them for the sales teams that make up your organization to improve their communication skills. They are more likely to perform better due to their diverse areas of expertise, and, most importantly, they are more likely to make meaningful connections with their counterparts as a result of this. You will be able to achieve the same benefits in a scalable and agile manner.
Discover how this tool can benefit you and how to choose the right one in the following section.
Benefits of a Conversation Intelligence Platform
A comprehensive conversation intelligence platform can prove to be valuable for your sales team. Take a look at some of the benefits.
Automatically find communication and connection gaps
You can uncover the actual tactics and behaviors of your most successful sales representatives with the best conversation intelligence technology without wasting valuable time listening to hundreds of sales calls or watching pitch videos.
It is easier to share these strengths with underperforming salespeople when they are defined as measurable data. Your team can eliminate productivity inconsistencies by leveraging this advantage.
Look for a platform that curates an extensive database of human-scored communication data to build its AI algorithms. They will be able to establish the efficiency of the most critical communications by using behavioral and social sciences in human communication and connection.
Improve the effectiveness of your usual sales strategies
Genuinely innovative sales leaders can close the skills gaps in their teams by implementing two primary approaches:
- Implement comprehensive, data-driven communications analysis to identify specific changes that will improve overall performance. Feedback on each micro skill would allow reps to practice until it becomes instinctive repeatedly.
- Secondly, salespeople should be allowed to learn through hands-on training while they are doing their daily tasks. Real-world training in real-time is more valuable than attending workshops or lessons based on hypothetical situations. They can make intelligent decisions, learn from their mistakes, and get real-time feedback based on real-world experiences.
An advanced conversation intelligence platform for your sales team can help you implement these two strategies automatically, quickly, and at scale.
Contribute to performance growth
A workshop, which is typically a short, one-time interaction, tends not to produce significant outcomes that last through time.
However, a great conversation intelligence platform will provide ongoing, regular feedback weekly or quarterly and even offer recommendations for practices based on specific data. Repetitious exposure to the same information or incentives makes them easier to remember.
With this tool, you can have a solution that acts as a virtual, personalized mentor or coach who gives consistent feedback relevant to an individual's development. By leveraging systematic practice features, your sales reps can enhance their ability to communicate and connect.
Generate data and insights that are useful to the whole organization
Using a conversation intelligence platform will uncover the building blocks of great conversations, improve customer relationships, and empower authentic customer experiences. In addition to your sales department, the data presented in an agile manner will be helpful to customer success, marketing, and other areas.
These are some of the advantages you can obtain by incorporating conversation intelligence into your sales tech stack. Following are some tips that can complement applying this solution to your team.
Tips for Leveraging Conversation Intelligence to Close More Deals
You can gain data-driven insights from conversations with prospects and customers with conversation intelligence. Sales, marketing, and customer experience teams can use this information to improve the customer journey, increase conversions, and ultimately drive more sales.
With AI, you can synergize all the capabilities of your employees with the capacity to continuously create meaningful connections with any audience. This tool will let you enable your team to continually develop and succeed as they will be able to communicate efficiently on a personal and precise level.
If you apply the following tips, you'll be able to harness this technology's potential and get benefits regardless of your industry.
Develop a team-based sales pitch
It can be very frustrating if the same prospect receives multiple value propositions throughout the product lifecycle. Reps who take prospects in various value directions risk making deals fail. However, standardizing your sales pitches will help you better control the lead lifecycle, realize quick, predictable wins and achieve your sales goals.
Understand your ecosystem and your competitive environment
To be successful, you and your team must fully understand the ecosystem in which you operate. As a sales leader, you need to know whether the market in your area is large and diversified or if it consists of only a few prominent players. Knowing what attracts your prospects is crucial. All of these factors will help you make intelligent decisions about pricing, positioning, and marketing.
Prospects' responses during any sales call can offer revealing insights into which value proposition is generating the most interest.
Educate your top executive officers
To improve their ability to connect with their teams, sales supervisors and other managers can utilize their best assets and eliminate their weaknesses. Keeping reps motivated, aware, and guided by clear goals is essential now more than ever. You can help your leaders learn skills like executive presence, influencing, handling complicated interactions, and dealing with rejection using the right AI-based conversation intelligence solution.
Your sales leadership team needs to communicate on behalf of your brand, and it is a skill they should pass on to their reps. By providing personalized coaching and data-driven feedback, you can make your senior reps or sales executives the best in the business. With leading conversation intelligence software, it is possible to implement individualized, on-demand coaching programs.
Align your representatives' strengths with customer interests
The effectiveness of your sales pitch is strongly correlated with the level of confidence your sales rep has in it. The combination of client interests and rep strengths is built into the sales process itself, so you already have a robust and scalable framework for delivering solid sales pitches.
Review all of sales reps’ conversations automatically
Reviewing sales call recordings allows you to design training or coaching programs at individual and collective levels. Also, your reps can learn more effectively and figure out what works and what doesn't. As a result of periodic reviews, your representatives will overcome obstacles and correct course, if necessary, to make sure they not only achieve quota but empathetically connect with clients and prospects.
Choose a platform that builds its AI algorithms using human-scored data from a communication database. Through combining behavioral and social sciences of human communication, this software will identify the most critical communication efficiency factors to meet your interaction goals.
Provide your team with relevant and actionable insights
It’s easy to get sidetracked when you're trying to find efficient ways of developing your team. It is possible to see so much content on the internet you could use to train your team, but the question is whether it can effectively meet your needs. The unique perspective derived from your own company's sales conversations provides useful insight into the reality that no other method can match. Rather than responding to market changes, you can work on growing from the inside out with the right software solution.
Things to Look for in a Top Conversation Intelligence Platform
Hopefully, now that you have read this brief overview, you have an idea of how your sales team's communication affects revenue. It is not just about what your sales representatives say, but how they say it, as well, so a conversation intelligence platform can help you understand key conversation elements automatically and at scale.
By utilizing AI technologies, you can accurately determine your level of credibility, persuasion, clarity, and trustworthiness. However, how can you find the right platform? Review the following features and characteristics before making an investment.
Revenue intelligence capabilities
In order to effectively implement conversation intelligence applications for sales, your platform of choice must integrate seamlessly with other software tools. When you can integrate solutions from the following categories: video conferencing tools, calendars, customer relationship management, human resources or learning management software, and learning experience platforms, you will be able to gain metrics into your revenue faster and make effective decisions.
Automatic conversation scoring capabilities
With the help of a leading tool, you can gain insights and intelligence and optimize team performance without requiring you to accompany your team in person or hear continuous recordings. This advantage is significant in an age when time-saving is critical, and you want the highest level of automation possible.
Ideally, the sales platform should automatically identify, score, and benchmark selling behaviors against established coaching methodologies as well as existing competency models for sales.
Sales-ready design and performance
By providing your reps with personal analytics, feedback, and development plans, the best solutions will be able to identify and remedy skill gaps so that your team can improve communication and improve results.
In addition to personalized feedback, guided learning journeys, step-by-step progress tracking and milestone motivation, your talent can take advantage of tips and best practices for additional development and performance enhancement.
It is possible for team members to take part in experiential learning, practice, and improve their skills because it differs from online courses in terms of the capabilities of practicing and improving their skills. To ensure your team's training is successful, find a tool with behavioral assessments, role-based scenarios, and a video and transcript library to provide the support you need.
Comprehensive manager insight reports
As a professional sales leader, you should ensure your platform provides reports and additional resources to help reps enhance their presence, improve performance, and close more deals. Make sure you are considering tools that can provide you with information about behaviors and skills, provide scores and rankings, assess strengths, provide improvement advice, and allow you to compare them to each other.
Would it be possible to put these insights together into leading conversation intelligence platforms for sales as well? Yes. Just make sure you also explore advanced reporting and analytics options such as individual and team reports, project progress reports, industry, job, and team benchmarks.
If an agent cannot demonstrate the value of a product or service, it will not be able to sell, no matter how unique it is. On the other hand, a representative who is a strong communicator can set up a company for success in the long run. Creating stronger customer relationships can lead to generating more revenue.
Sales reps are better able to establish human connections with Quantified's AI technology, designed not just to save deals but actually to close more deals. We will provide you with an exclusive measure of connection effectiveness, the QC Score. You can compare your skill level with peers, industry benchmarks, and aspirational benchmarks. With automated feedback, coaching, and measurement, Quantified assesses customer interactions, measures performance based on critical behavioral dimensions, and transforms your team into high-achieving salespeople.