When a coach wants to see what worked and what did not in a past play, they turn to the game tape. The video captured reveals individual performances — and it also gives an oversight into the team’s performance together.
In B2B selling, key performance metrics such as engagement gaps, message relevancy, salesperson mis-steps and more can be exposed in buyer conversations. And conversation intelligence (CI) software has become the game tape to record and review your team’s winning (and losing) moments. This tool is even included as a built-in part of the best sales enablement platforms today.
While many selling organizations invest in CI technology, most still fail to fully adopt this tool or meaningfully apply its insights. The potential benefits of integrating CI insights into your sales enablement program are too good to ignore. Learn how to make the most of your CI investment.
HAVE AN EAGLE EYE (AND EAR) TO SALES PRODUCTIVITY
Today, in our uncertain and sluggish marketplace, leaders are embracing a transition from growth at all costs to efficient growth. And a key part of productivity is making the most of the resources you currently have.
You can look at this as an opportunity to better use your technology stack. If you are investing in conversation intelligence, why not use it for all it is worth (which is quite a bit)? You can also look at this from a workforce vantage point. How can you make the most of your salespeople and each of their buyer engagements?
CI can help you improve the efficiency and efficacy of your salespeople. As buyers continue to distance away from salespeople more and more, every direct interaction between buyers and sellers becomes all the more important.
CI tools use artificial intelligence (AI) to turn recordings into insights. Both qualitative insights — like recorded calls, meetings and emails to study — and quantitative data — like analytics, trends and dashboards — give your leadership eyes and ears into not only the competencies of your sales team, but, more importantly, actual buyer engagements (what is working and what is not working).
The real game-changer is how leadership uses this data and insights, though. Heads of sales can apply this tool in a number of ways to boost techniques and behaviors. And our friends at Mediafly have some tips.
LOOK TO BUYER CONVERSATIONS FOR DEEPER INSIGHTS
Mediafly is a leading provider of one of the most comprehensive sales enablement and revenue intelligence platforms, offering conversation intelligence and more. Their experts share more below about how your sales leaders can use CI to assess sales engagements with buyers:
Most sales performance gaps can be surfaced in buyer conversations. And with CI, sales leaders can actually extract these issues and address them — if they are using the tool to its full potential.
There are a number of vital sales performance metrics every organization should track against. With CI capturing data and delivering insights in real time, sales leaders can coach their team to adjust and improve.
Activity — how much is the rep actually doing?
- Number of leads created
- Number of calls made
- Number of emails sent
- Number of follow ups
- Number of social media connections
- Number of logged visits
- Number of conversations
- Number of discovery call summaries
- Number of meetings scheduled
- Discovery call to meeting rate
- Number of demos or sales pitches
- Number of proposals sent
- Close ratio
- Number of referral requests
- Number of attempted upsells
Productivity — how are these activities moving the needle forward?
- Sales cycle length
- Open vs. closed opportunities
- Pipeline value
- Average deal size
- Win rate
Success — how are these activities translating into revenue?
- Successful Quota attainment
- Pipeline lifetime value (LTV)
- Annual / monthly recurring revenue (ARR / MRR)
- Average revenue per user / account
Find out how to use CI insights to create sales coaching impact from Mediafly here.
ENGAGE YOUR CI INSIGHTS FOR SUSTAINABLE REVENUE PERFORMANCE
Conversation intelligence software can collect mass amounts of valuable data and insights as part of your overall sales enablement management — but your leadership must implement and apply this technology to realize true go-to-market and revenue outcomes.
The dashboard and trends offer sales, marketing and operational leadership a view into the conversations buyers and sellers are having, but if the selling organization does not take those insights and make adjustments, then the case can be made that the entire effort was all for naught.
For example, if the data indicated sellers are talking too much in buyer meetings, is that because they are pitching, are not asking enough / effective questions of the buyer, are answering the questions before the buyer responds — or something else altogether?
The variation in answer to each of those questions can dictate an entirely different path forward where different parts of the organization are activated. Sometimes that may be a sales skills uplift, in another case it may be a new / repackaged sales tool. While in a different scenario the answer may be to shift to a new buying audience.
An inaccurate interpretation of the “map” CI data draws can send an entire team down the incorrect remediation path. But intelligent interpretation of the insights can lead to game-changing results that feed into sustainable revenue performance.
LEARN MORE ABOUT CI FROM AN EXPERT
CI can help you gather insights more easily and drive you to success. If you are interested in learning more about CI and what it can offer, please contact us.