There are 101 ways that customers can use a conversation intelligence platform. We observed and we listened, then documented here for your benefit. How else can you leverage your conversation assets? Comment below.
Conversation Intelligence Allows Sales Executives to:
- Helps New Sales VP assessing organization in first 100 days
- Can record sales managers doing pipeline reviews
- Helps understand what’s being said on sales calls at scale
- Aids in Sharing ideas and real sales call examples with geographically distributed sales reps
- Aligns sales managers on what a good sales call looks like
- Provides guidance for managers to coach with while developing the skill of sales manager coaching
- Helps forecast sales by listening to the last 3 minutes of the most recent call to know immediately if a deal is going to close or not
- Enables the Implementation of a call evaluation scoring program
- Allows you to use select parts of highlighted sales calls at sales kickoff (SKO) meetings
- Allows you to use select parts of highlighted sales calls to illustrate points or settle debates at Board meetings
- Enables reps review and annotate one of your call recordings to set the right tone for a culture of safe learning – putting yourself out there
- Exposes managers who don’t coach
- Provide Win/loss reviews
- – Monitor, coach, and score calls from Remote reps who work from home, just like they are in the office
Conversation Intelligence Allows Sales Managers to:
- Provides insight on Diagnosing problems in turnaround situation
- Onboarding – push the easy button by having new reps listen to the best calls of experienced reps and see annotations for why they are good
- CRM has no notes – pull up the calls with that account to get up to speed
- Reduces the ramp time to productivity for new reps
- Provides field monitoring and coaching without getting on a plane, train, or automobile
- Reduces down time doing side-by-sides
- Ensures that reps are using our messaging consistently
- Ensures that reps asking the right questions and listening
- Ask about other decision makers early enough in the sales process
- Confirm that your reps are not interrupting the customer
- Seizing opportunities to challenge the buyer’s status quo
- Checking that reps are doing our demo the right way
- Ensure reps are differentiating effectively
- Don’t miss any buying signals
- Makes sure reps bring up other products?
- Verifies that reps are closing the call with concrete next steps?
- Enables a Best call of the month contest
- Assists in Closing deals that wouldn’t have closed
- Call calibrations
- Role play on the phone and review the ‘practice tape’ with conversation intelligence
Conversation Intelligence Helps to Ensure that Your Reps are:
- Veteran sales reps getting out of a slump with self-diagnosis
- Listening to one of your own best calls to psych yourself up to start your day
- Eliminates filler words
- Setting agendas and upfront expectations correctly
- Ensure that your reps are not talking too much
- Ensure that your reps are asking the right questions
- Seizing opportunities to offer a different product
- Hearing buying signals and responding correctly
- Ending calls in concrete next steps rather than open ended
- Focusing less on note taking in the moment and more on being present during the conversation with the buyer
- Reviewing calls later and commenting on the timeline of the call
- Annotating calls and sharing with prospects who share with other decision makers to build consensus faster
- Field reps sharing best practices with peers who work out of home offices
- Listening to the SDR/BDR/ADR/LDR call to hear how they set the initial meeting to better prepare than reading notes in the CRM alone
- Individual development – just like watching ‘game film’ in sports
- Sharing parts of sales calls with sales engineers / solution consultants to get them up to speed and make the case for the time of the sales engineer / solution consultant for the next sales call
- Sharing calls with customer success to get stories of similar customers and references
- Sharing annotated calls with customer success / account managers after you close a deal to get them up to speed
Conversation Intelligences Allows Sales Enablement / Learning and Development to:
- Review reps skills mastery
- Enable the transfer of knowledge
- Ensure reps are using what they learned on real sales calls
- Ensure managers are reinforcing training curriculum
- Using real calls, with annotations, in the company LMS
- Engage Millennials
- Provide a fresh, new approach for company learning (real examples are better than role playing mock scenarios)
- Address the biggest objection from sales reps in the classroom: “Yes, but does this work in the real world?”
Conversation Intelligence Empowers Customer Success Teams to:
- Make sure your customers feel heard…Listened to… that their needs are being met… Find out from their point of view.
- Better hand off from sales – CS reviews highlights in sales calls to hear the voice of the customer unfiltered and better get up to speed
- Not relying on poor / inaccurate notes in CRM
- Maximize efficiency with one view of all conversations with an account
- Consistency in customer kick off calls, user training, quarterly check ins, and renewal calls
- Provide a more structured process that drives higher quality implementations
- Best practices in handling technical implementation
- Spotting and cataloguing new methods for conducting customer calls
- Being proactive – bringing up things that should be brought up
- Keep an eye on competitor mentions
- Sharing information, customer challenges, or game plans with other colleagues on the customer account team
- Share the voice of customer with the product team
- Missed opportunity for up-sell and cross-sell
- Saving customers that would have dropped and decreasing churn
Conversation Intelligence Lets Customer Support Teams:
- Ramping up new agents / specialists faster
- Lower time to resolution for support cases/tickets
- Improving customer satisfaction scores
- Decreased staffing to handle same call volume due to better call control
- Having a library of the best calls for different types of issue resolution
- Having a better pulse on what’s being said on the phone
- Decreasing the number of escalations needed as more issues are resolved on the first call
- Coaching Millennial agents / specialists who love to learn from real examples
- Help improve Erlang formula results
- Sharing support calls back to account managers, sales or customer success to keep them in the loop
Conversation Intelligence is Used by Marketing Teams to:
- Make sure marketing messaging is being used by sales reps
- See how the market is responding to our messaging
- Understand why leads from a particular marketing campaign aren’t converting into opportunities
- Hearing how AEs do discovery on first scheduled sales calls
- Hearing the ‘voice of the customer’ unfiltered
- What should our user conference theme be?
- See which speakers will drive the most registrations at our field marketing events
- Keeping a pulse on the market.
- Hearing how buyers react to our company compared with competitors.
- Creating a better customer experience by leveraging what’s being said to fill in the story beyond metrics
- Listen to customer pain points
Conversation Intelligence Platforms Are Used by Product Teams to:
- Assists in rolling out new products
- Provides asynchronous product training at scale
- Hearing customers want a feature
Conversation Intelligence is Leveraged by Channel Partners to:
- Sharing info with partners
- Find out what is working in the channel
- Resolving channel conflict – ‘the tape don’t lie’
Conversation Intelligence is Used by Information Technology (IT) to:
- Running out of storage space where recordings of phone calls and online screen sharing meetings are saved and avoiding extra variable costs
Bonus: Human Resources (HR) Use Conversation Intelligence to:
- Termination for cause – what’s being said on calls is inappropriate
- Learning what’s happening on recruiting calls
- Sharing screening calls with hiring managers
