Are you relying on your sales intuition?
Sales reps are using their intuition, rather than data insights, to prioritise leads. As data becomes the driving force behind business decisions, here’s how voice data and AI can help sales teams to succeed.
End not knowing
What is more important to a sales person than a conversation with a customer? The most valuable of these most commonly occur over the phone, when a back-and-forth over email is just not good enough. But as soon as the call ends, the information and insight held within the conversation vanishes. With 67% of salespeople saying that enforcement of activity logging is stricter than in 2019, accurately recording customer interactions is more important than ever.
Trying to capture the substance of a sales conversation is tricky. Taking notes during or after a call is a drain on productivity, and isn’t all that efficient. Salespeople will inevitably be distracted if they try to take notes while they are talking, and might not remember the key takeaways if they are writing after the conversation has finished.
Recording calls is the only way to preserve the value in a conversation, but traditional approaches have been focused on fixed lines within an office environment. The times they are a-changin’ — even more so in a post-COVID world. Offices are stationed at kitchen counters around the world, while calls are being taken on mobile devices and over IP connections. It’s impossible to capture these conversations without a solution that is built in the cloud with the agility to record every call, no matter where it happens.
As businesses adapt to a world of face masks, social distancing, and an increased reliance on technology for communication, customer service and satisfaction is more important than ever . Sales teams realising that AI can be used to improve internal processes and customer experiences, with 57% of high-performing sales organisations using the technology. A detailed understanding of a customer’s needs and their feelings about a brand or product can give a salesperson the edge, but this takes time. With huge volumes of call data, it’s impossible to drill down to insights at such scale. The solution is voice AI.
How to boost conversion rates by up to 30%
What if every single conversation within a business could be harnessed to power data-driven decision making? Voice AI transforms recorded conversations into data that can be used by businesses to gain insights into everything from the efficiency of business processes, to product development, to the success of marketing campaigns, to customer satisfaction. Not only can companies combine this with other business data for 360º visibility, they can even use conversational content to power automation within the business.
Using AI in sales has been shown to boost conversion rates by up to 30% when interacting with sales leads. Call data can be integrated with a CRM to automatically populate accounts with records of every single voice conversation, including a full transcript. Sales reps can use these records to recap customer needs and create hyper-personalised offerings based on their exact requirements. 69% of the highest performing salespeople had automated logging of customer notes.
Transcripts and recordings also act as evidence, meaning that crucial conversation with a customer will never be lost. Agreements can be referred to, and disputes can be resolved quickly and easily with an exact record of what was said.
The cure for churn
Sentiment analysis can gauge a customer’s feelings about a brand and even indicate those who are about to churn. By analysing the words spoken by a customer, voice AI can rate each part of a conversation, and the call as a whole, with positive, negative, or neutral sentiment. Using APIs, calls rated with a negative sentiment score can trigger an alert or even automate process, such as creating a task in a CRM such as Salesforce.
With the detailed records of previous interactions, salespeople can make personal contact with leads and existing customers to help to nurture a relationship. Where once a customer might churn after a negative conversation, automated alerts and task creation allow sales reps to proactively repair and maintain relationships. Understanding customer needs was the number one reason for AI adoption, as stated by sales teams surveyed by Salesforce.
Not only are calls rated by sentiment, but voice AI can actually identify specific emotions based on what a caller said, allowing for an even more tailored approach to selling. Questions during a call might indicate an analytical or tentative customer who might require more evidence of the benefits of a product or service, whereas a lead who made more active statements might be more confident in their opinions and be more ready to close the sale.
A version of this post was published over on the Dubber blog.
