Introducing Chorus
Conversation Intelligence for Sales Teams
Conversations are powerful. We communicate our thoughts, intentions and emotions, in context. We build trust and credibility. We make decisions. For businesses, conversations with customers are especially important.
Every conversation we have with a prospect is an opportunity. An opportunity for new business, of course. But more importantly, an opportunity to build a relationship, and to ask, listen and learn about a prospects’ goals, pains and needs. It’s where sales people can start to challenge their world view and persuade them that now is the time to solve that pain — and that we’re the right ones to do it. Relationships are built one conversation at a time, and that doesn’t change whether a sales organization is 10 people, or 100, or 1,000.
“Every company could be a world-class sales organization if it ‘only knew what it knew.’”
- Charlie Besecker, Global Sales Enablement at Qualtrics
As organizations, what do we know about the conversations we have with our prospects and customers? Very little, it turns out. A typical 50-person sales team has over 10,000 hours of conversations a quarter. For the 2.4M inside sales reps in the United States, those conversations are how they make a living. Sales conversations are the heart of over a trillion dollars in revenue, and a meaningful chunk of our cost structure.
And they’re a black box — except for the notes captured in your CRM. (They are all captured in your CRM, right? :)
There is a real cost to conversations done poorly, and tremendous upside to doing them well. If you’re in sales, you already know the impact of consistently doing the following on win rate, sales cycle and deal size:
- Building rapport and setting an agenda, so the prospect is receptive and gets what they need from you
- Doing proper discovery through asking good, open ended questions, listening, and peeling the onion
- Sharing compelling customer stories and selling value, not features
- Dedicating enough time to establish concrete next steps
- Differentiating against competitors, handling objections
- How you frame pricing
- …and more
Until fairly recently, the building blocks needed to understand conversations and surface the insights within them weren’t good enough. They are now: Algorithms can transcribe every word of a conversation, find the key moments mentioned above, and tease apart patterns that impact your win rates and sales cycles.
Starting today, organizations that capture and act on the insights surfaced from their sales conversations will out-execute their competitors. Companies like Marketo, Cisco Meraki, and Qualtrics have started to capture and improve their conversations using Chorus.
We’ve seen these patterns before. In marketing, we knew very little about attribution in the days of TV and Radio. As more ad dollars moved to the internet, marketing became more data driven. Today you’d be hard pressed to find a business that doesn’t measure, track and improve their marketing conversion funnel.
Sales should be no different, but it is — because a manager cannot sit in on every call to understand why two people on their team consistently crush their quotas, or help a rep improve their skills. Most managers will tell you it’s “low ROI” or a bad use of their time — — because it is. So “the middle of the pack” rarely get the attention and coaching they want and deserve. But what if technology could sit in on all those calls and surface the moments you should hear, for you.
In sales, what you say and how you say it matters. Without the right training and coaching, a new sales rep will burn through every lead no matter how many at bats they’re given. There’s a reason that CSO Insights found that win rates go from ~40 to ~60% when you have a proper coaching program in place. What would a 20% increase in win rate do for your quarter? Now imagine scaling and supercharging a manager’s ability to improve their team’s skills — -shortening cycle times, ramp times and increasing deal sizes.
If you run a sales team and haven’t seen Chorus, reach out. We’d love to learn more about what you care about. If we can help, we’ll have you up and running in as little as 5 minutes (yes, really). We are extremely lucky to be working with forward thinking companies and sales leaders who step up to deliver big numbers, care about their people, want to see them grow and develop, and hold us accountable to delivering real results. And we’re here for the long-run.
