Imagine how much time you spend on call notes and tracking customer chats & sales analysis. It’s likely a lot, given that sales reps spend a big chunk of their week (70%!) on tasks that aren’t selling, as per the Salesforce State of Sales Report.
Artificial Intelligence, however, work much faster than humans. This is clear with conversation intelligence. This powerful tool uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to find important insights from all your conversations.
What is Conversation Intelligence?
Conversation intelligence uses AI and machine learning to gather and study all the talks your sales team has with customers. Then, it gives them key information to help grow sales.
It takes details like pricing or competitor names from your sales team’s calls (spoken or written) or video meetings. Then, conversation intelligence provides helpful insights like meeting summaries or spotting trends. Teams can use this information to better understand customers and improve how they sell, leading to more deals.
Why Conversation Intelligence is Key for Sales
More sales teams are now using AI. The Salesforce State of Sales Report shows that 83% of sales teams using AI saw more income last year, compared to only 66% of teams without AI. Plus, 80% of sales reps say AI makes it easy to get the customer insights they need to close deals, versus 54% without AI. Conversation intelligence is one way teams use AI, and it helps sales by:
- Helping Focus on Customers: Sales reps can truly listen and talk with a customer instead of taking notes during a call. The technology gives written records of talks and summarizes call information. With this, the sales rep can easily find specific call details for personalized follow-up messages.
- Making Work Faster: Conversation intelligence speeds up boring sales tasks. A sales rep can quickly find important parts of a talk instead of looking through piles of notes. This information creates call summaries, which can be automatically put into a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and shared with sales leaders and other teams.
- Improving Sales Coaching: Almost half of sales teams use AI for conversation intelligence to help with call coaching, according to the Salesforce State of Sales Report. This means the AI points out moments in calls where reps can learn. Sales leaders can watch call recordings and give feedback by highlighting and commenting on important parts. They can find ways for sellers to improve, like talking less and listening more, or handling objections better. This helps sellers perform better.
How to Find Insights with Conversation Intelligence
One of the best things conversation intelligence can do is analyze calls for specific keywords and phrases. By setting up custom keywords important to your business, you can deeply understand your customers and potential buyers. After a call, the technology highlights your keywords. You can then look at the exact parts of the call where those words appeared. This helps you understand customer needs, moving sales forward. You can even set up alerts in your CRM and assign tasks for things mentioned in the call, like scheduling a meeting or answering a question.
Here are some keywords to think about:
- Names of rival companies or their products/services.
- Features or abilities of your own product.
- Customer feelings, concerns, or things they object to.
- Customer’s internal problems or challenges.
- What customers think about your pricing.
For example: Imagine a salesperson for a project management software company is on a call. They know the customer is looking at a cheaper competitor. The seller sets custom keywords for that competitor and for pricing. After the call, the conversation intelligence flags the competitor’s name and cost. The seller then gets an automatic alert in their CRM to send a follow-up email with a special discount.
How Conversation Intelligence Makes Customer Experience Better
Conversation intelligence also helps improve the customer experience by quickly getting new sellers up to speed. Instead of a long handover process with the previous sales rep, conversation intelligence provides all the past details about customer talks. This saves time and avoids mistakes.
With this information at their fingertips, new reps can confidently join customer calls, fully informed and ready for challenges. This stops customers from getting frustrated by having to repeat what they’ve already said. It also builds trust between sellers and customers.
Other ways conversation intelligence improves the customer experience include:
- Personalization: Sales reps can make their messages more personal based on past talks. For instance, if a customer mentioned a business challenge on a call, the sales rep can address how their product solves it in a follow-up email.
- Higher Customer Satisfaction: Conversation intelligence checks customer feelings by analyzing tone and how loud they speak. Sellers can use this to spot signs of unhappiness, like a raised voice or negative words, and fix them.
- Better Products or Services: Conversation intelligence gathers customer feedback about your product or service, like a faulty part or a bad design. Your team can easily share this feedback with product development to solve issues.
Best Ways to Use Conversation Intelligence
Companies are making conversation intelligence a priority. They are making sure their teams can use AI for sales properly. The Salesforce State of Sales Report shows that 44% of sales teams are planning training programs for employees before using AI. Here are some best practices when using AI like conversation intelligence with your team:
- Match Sales Goals with CI: Decide how your sales team can best use conversation intelligence to reach your sales goals. Making your sales quota or increasing sales income are common goals. But you could also aim to shorten sales cycles or beat a competitor. Set custom keywords for these goals and see how your team is doing.
- Evaluate How Actions Impacted Sales: To truly see the impact of your actions, integrate conversation intelligence with your sales analytics tools. First, use a sales analytics tool built into your CRM for clear visibility across your entire sales pipeline. Then, reinforce or re-evaluate those actions as needed. For example, if sellers are constantly offering discounts for a prospect’s pricing objection but that isn’t closing more deals, then look for other approaches to overcome the objection.
- Improve Sales Meeting Prep: Train your sales team to review past customer call summaries before their next meeting. The goal is to refer to specific points the customer made. This shows the seller was listening and cared. Start the meeting by bringing up these points, even using customer quotes, and ask if they still hold true for the customer today.
- Keep Data High-Quality: Bad data quality can slow down sales. Nearly one-third of sales pros say this affects accurate AI results, according to the Salesforce State of Sales Report. Keep customer data in your CRM updated, in one place, and automatically synced. This gives you a full view of all customer talks and insights from conversation intelligence and other sales areas.
Choosing the Right Conversation Intelligence Tool
A conversation intelligence tool uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand human language. It is powered by AI to find and organize data. Often, these tools are built right into a CRM. However, if your CRM is separate, make sure it connects with your conversation intelligence tool to sync customer data. You’ll also want a tool that can grow with your team, handling more users and data as you expand.
Look for a conversation intelligence tool with these features:
- Call Recording, Transcripts, and Summaries: Automatically record calls and create a written record with a summary. This saves time on notes and reading full transcripts.
- Call Analysis and Insights: Make sure your tool can be set up for your unique keywords. This ensures your analysis and insights are specific to your customers. Call insights should link to parts of the transcript so you can easily check the full context.
- Call Trend Dashboard: The tool should spot patterns for popular topics or competitive risks across your sales team’s calls. It should show how often things are mentioned over time and give sales leaders a summary of insights about sales opportunities.
- Alerts and Notifications: 58% of sales pros use AI for task reminders, says the Salesforce State of Sales Report. A good tool lets you set up automatic alerts to remind sellers of things they need to follow up on after a call.
- Sales Enablement: Consider tools that help with sales coaching and training. Some tools send a personalized email to each sales rep with daily coaching ideas, including relevant call recordings, a summary of insights, and details from the sales opportunity.
Make Every Sales Conversation Count with Conversation Intelligence
Conversation intelligence helps your organization get more value from your sales team’s talks with customers. You’ll automatically gain AI-powered analysis and insights. These are key to understanding your customers’ needs so you can provide personalized service. With conversation intelligence, you can improve your customers’ experience and satisfaction, which in turn boosts your sales.
Ready to transform your sales analysis and elevate every customer interaction?
As you’ve seen, mastering sales conversations through AI is the key to unlocking new levels of performance. It’s about moving beyond guesswork and using data to drive every decision, integrating seamlessly with your existing sales analytics efforts. mihup.ai provides the cutting-edge conversation intelligence and deep analytics you need to truly transform your sales strategy. Gain unparalleled insights into every customer interaction, optimize your processes, and empower your team with actionable intelligence that directly impacts your bottom line.
Visit mihup.ai today to discover how you can turn every conversation into your ultimate sales advantage.
