As 82% of marketers recognize the potential of zero-party data for creating effective personalized experiences, conversational intelligence can be a game-changer for sales professionals. By collecting valuable data from your conversations with prospects and customers and providing in-depth analysis, you make informed decisions, drive sales growth, and meet your sales targets.
In this guide, we’ll explain what conversational intelligence is, its role in sales team management, and how to choose the best conversational intelligence platform to up your sales game.
What is conversational intelligence?
Conversational intelligence is the technology that extracts valuable insights from interactions between two individuals during a call or virtual meeting. It is particularly useful for sales teams to analyze data and avoid repeating mistakes while also capitalizing on the best opportunities.
Conversational intelligence tools automatically generate a transcript, summary, and highlights of your conversations. Additionally, they collect frequently used keywords throughout the discussion to provide a comprehensive analysis of the entire conversation.
This technology provides valuable insights into the objections and queries raised by customers when making a purchase from your junior team member. This information can be utilized to coach your SDRs, enhancing their communication style and helping them become better at their job.
As a result, conversational intelligence not only prevents you from juggling between multiple tabs and tasks but also empowers your entire team with actionable insights. An excellent example of this is its ability to evaluate the interaction between your junior sales representative and prospect or customer.
Role of conversational intelligence in sales team management
There’s no denying the fact that conversational intelligence (as well as AI in general) is the future of sales communication. Here’s how it plays a key role in sales team management.
1. Sales onboarding
Newly hired sales representatives face numerous challenges when joining a new company, ranging from understanding policies to validating their capabilities. Therefore, ensuring that their onboarding process is conducted effectively is of utmost importance.
Conversational intelligence helps maintain an effective onboarding process. It allows sales representatives to advance their skills and increase productivity by learning the insights collected by conversational intelligence. According to a report, businesses can increase their yearly revenue by 60% by implementing a well-organized onboarding process.
With conversational intelligence, you have the ability to incorporate the collected insights into training lectures for onboarding new sales team members. This enables you to set a higher baseline level of knowledge and skill for all sales workforce hired, thereby streamlining the sales process and operations.
2. Sales coaching
Sales coaching promotes teamwork and collaboration within a sales team. According to a survey, conducting a weekly sales coaching session resulted in a 43% success rate.
Conversational intelligence provides you with valuable insights for conducting effective sales coaching sessions. It offers you a comprehensive overview of each team member’s performance and identifies any recurring errors or issues that need to be addressed.
By utilizing these reports, you can provide personalized feedback and suggestions to each individual based on their specific areas of improvement. This will enable them to enhance their performance and contribute to optimizing sales.
3. Data-driven customer insights
Data-driven decision-making is a crucial factor in the growth and success of organizations. This concept is further supported by a report from the McKinsey Global Institute. It indicates that data-driven organizations have a 23-fold higher likelihood of acquiring new customers, as well as a 6-fold greater chance of retaining them.
Conversational intelligence serves as a valuable tool for gathering data that can aid in generating sales. By utilizing this technology, you can listen, comprehend, and analyze common objections or concerns raised by your customers.
4. Sales call analytics
Thanks to conversational intelligence technology, there is no need to monitor every call made by your sales team. This technology allows you to easily analyze and extract key insights from conversations between your representatives and prospects.
This is especially beneficial for larger sales teams, where monitoring every call is not practical. With conversational intelligence, you can avoid guesswork and derive valuable insights instead. These insights can be used to create new and effective solutions that align with your customer’s expectations.
5. Sales forecasting & intelligence
Conversational intelligence is a powerful tool that allows you to collect valuable historical information from your interactions with prospects. By analyzing prospects’ concerns and suggestions, you can gain insights into their needs and preferences. This, in turn, can help you predict future sales.
This data can be used to optimize your product or service and to effectively reach out to prospects and convert them into lifelong customers. Moreover, by taking into account customers’ recommendations, you can identify opportunities for upselling and cross-selling that can help you grow your business and increase revenue.
6. Cross-department collaboration
Conversational intelligence presents endless possibilities for organizations beyond just the sales team. It has the potential to democratize customer knowledge, making it accessible to all members who contribute to the organization’s financial success.
One of the key benefits of conversational intelligence is its ability to share transcribed notes and highlights with other departments. This enables them to gain a better understanding of areas that need improvement and to analyze how they can meet customer expectations more effectively.
How to choose the best conversational intelligence platform
Selecting the right conversational intelligence platform can be a challenging task, given the wide variety of options available. To make the best decision for your business, it’s important to consider the following critical capabilities.
Concise summary
Time is a precious commodity in the fast-paced world of sales. That’s why a conversational intelligence platform that offers a concise meeting summary can be a game-changer for sales teams.
With a brief summary of meeting insights, sales professionals can quickly gain a comprehensive understanding of what was discussed and what actions are required. This saves valuable time that can be better spent on closing deals and other critical tasks.
Keywords and snippets
A promising feature of any effective conversational intelligence platform is its ability to capture and highlight important keywords from conversations. By identifying and highlighting the frequently used keywords, the platform helps you quickly understand the main topics and themes discussed during a video meeting or a teleconference.
This keyword-based approach makes it easy to search and find specific conversations, eliminating the need to sift through hours of recorded calls or transcripts.
Browsing speaker
There are often multiple participants in a sales team meeting, each contributing to the conversation. A robust conversational intelligence platform can help you navigate these meetings more effectively, allowing you to search for interactions with a specific speaker quickly.
By searching for a specific speaker, you can easily locate and review the relevant meeting portions that pertain to that person’s contributions.
Video highlight reel
Video highlight reels are one of the most valuable features of a conversational intelligence platform. They take the entire meeting or video call and condense it, highlighting the key moments and critical insights that were discussed.
By watching the highlight reel, you can pick the pace and analyze the crucial points of the conversation without having to spend hours watching the entire video.
Real-time transcription
An ideal conversational intelligence platform includes transcriptions of calls and meetings. It enables you to capture every detail of the conversation, from the tone of voice to specific word choices.
This level of detail gives you an extensive understanding of your prospect’s needs and preferences. Additionally, it can help you identify areas to improve your sales approach.
Sharing options
A key advantage of a conversational intelligence platform is the ability to share feedback and collaborate with your sales team easily. Look for a platform that offers a sharing option, allowing you to share the transcribed notes, highlights, and video recordings with your team and other departments. This makes it easier to stay on the same page, collaborate effectively, and provide continuous training to improve sales performance.
Conclusion
As customer expectations evolve, salespeople need to enhance their skills and deliver exceptional experiences that build long-lasting relationships. Conversational intelligence is a powerful tool that empowers salespeople to do just that.
By using conversational intelligence, salespeople can better understand customers’ needs, build trust, and ultimately close more deals. Moreover, conversational intelligence also helps to create positive brand experiences, leading to increased customer loyalty and referrals. In the modern era, conversational intelligence serves as a valuable asset for salespeople.
Mary Paulene Omae San Miguel is a Senior Content Editor for RingCentral, a leading provider of global enterprise cloud communications, video meetings, collaboration, and contact center solutions. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a great passion for learning foreign languages.
Connect with her on LinkedIn.
