What drives your sales readiness strategy? Assumptions? Hunches? Numbers?

Data reveals a lot, but it’s only part of the story. What if you could use real-life customer conversations to inform selling decisions? Conversation intelligence makes this possible by using data from reps’ customer interactions to improve performance.

Continue reading to learn more about what conversation intelligence is, and why it should be an essential piece of your sales readiness program.

Common challenges with sales calls

While handling sales calls is one of the most common responsibilities of a seller’s job, they are inherently unpredictable and can become derailed quickly — a reality that is even more common in a remote work environment. When meeting in person, it’s easier for reps to build rapport and keep things on track. On a video call, or even worse, on the phone, it’s hard to gauge how a buyer is feeling and respond accordingly to continue moving in the right direction.

After reviewing notes, ensuring audio/video is working properly, and clearing video backgrounds of distractions, sellers have a lot to juggle during remote sales meetings. They’ve got to deliver product and solution messaging clearly and effectively; actively listen to the buyer’s questions, concerns, and hesitations; and jot down action items.

Call tracking solutions were introduced to help sellers overcome some of these challenges by enabling them to easily record calls to collect data about the length and number of calls. But, to get actionable data, sales teams need more.

Conversation intelligence goes beyond deal insights

Conversation intelligence takes call tracking not one, but several layers deeper. While it can help identify risks and challenges within specific deals by enabling you to access voice of customer insights, it can also help you go beyond what happened to actionably fix things through built-in sales training programs and sales content management.

Like call tracking, conversation intelligence solutions record calls, but they also transcribe them so reps don’t have to take notes during meetings or go back to listen to recordings. With the added power of AI, conversation intelligence tracks additional information, such as customer sentiment and keywords, for more specific analysis. You can also integrate conversation intelligence with your sales content management system. As you do so, AI can suggest content reps might want to use before and after key meetings based on the call and account history.

What conversation intelligence can measure

So, what specific metrics can conversation intelligence assess? When set up properly, a conversation intelligence platform gathers the following data for every rep call:

• Talk ratio (talking vs. listening)
• Questions asked
• Questions received
• Longest monologue (buyer or seller)
• Use of filler words
• Keyword mentions
• Sentiment

As an example, keyword mentions could include tracking themes around competitor names, product names, and marketing messaging — for AI to flag. For instance, if you want sellers to discuss a new product with buyers, the name of this product can be set as a keyword. After a call, you can go back and see whether the product was mentioned and, if so, how many times. On the reverse side, you can create a set of words that you don’t want salespeople to mention.

Finally, conversation intelligence technology uses certain terms (e.g., “I will send,” “as a next step”) to create a list of action items following the call, reducing the chance for something falling through the cracks and halting a deal.

Turning call insights into action

Analyzing data pulled from your conversation intelligence platform will tell you which reps on your team are having success and highlight the behaviors they practice during sales calls. But simply having this information isn’t enough. While conversation intelligence automates much of the call analysis process and can provide recommendations, sales leaders can also dive deeper into the context of specific calls to drive better decision-making.

For instance, they can look at the call summaries of top sellers. How are they addressing objections and frequently asked questions? What products and features are they focused on? When competitors come up, what do they share with buyers?

By pinpointing these winning behaviors, sales leaders can share snippets and best-of call playlists with their team. They can also more effectively benchmark performance and use data from real calls to inform one-to-one coaching sessions.

It’s important to keep in mind that best practices will depend on the rep’s particular role on the team and the context of the conversation. A business development rep on a discovery call will ask questions and listen, while a sales engineer performing a demo will lead much of the conversation from the front. For this reason, you’ll likely end up with several best practices that apply to different teams, individuals, and call types.

While you can identify top seller behaviors, you can also spot where lower performers may need help. For instance, AI can flag that when some reps speak about pricing, buyers start to get lost by asking lots of follow-up questions, speaking hesitantly, or mentioning objections. This should raise a red flag that the rep needs some additional coaching around your pricing model.

Altogether, the use cases outlined above contribute to an impactful sales readiness program. Identifying best practices and knowledge gaps by using calls from top sellers will enable you to build an onboarding and ongoing coaching strategy based on real-life buyer interactions.

Salespeople aren’t constantly on the phone closing deals. Their roles require a lot of moving parts: managing pipelines, building knowledge and skills, practicing pitches and objection handling, and meeting with managers for coaching sessions. The simpler and more efficient these tasks can be, the more time reps can spend solving customer problems and generating revenue.

Jennifer O’Neill, Director of Employee and Partner Enablement at Eightfold, an AI-powered talent intelligence platform, knew there were changes that could be made within her own sales organization to make reps more productive and therefore more successful.

What was the key to improving productivity and performance? Centralization and simplification through Mindtickle, enabling Eightfold to train reps, manage sales content, and analyze conversation insights from the field. Keep reading to learn how Eightfold has achieved a streamlined experience.

How Eightfold streamlines the rep experience

#1: Consolidating tools

The number of SaaS tools a sales organization needs was amplified by the emergence of remote work. To fill in the process gaps created by remote-first workplaces, businesses have fast-tracked software deployment and digital transformation.

Eightfold is no stranger to using software for sales support. Prior to unifying its sales tech stack with Mindtickle, the leadership team used Gong for conversation intelligence and Google Drive to house and manage content. While Gong served as a catalyst for gathering voice-of-customer insights, there was no capability to connect customer conversations to content use or training performance or to predict which teams and reps were most prepared to hit their quota. The objective for moving to Call AI was to solve this gap. Using disjointed technology also meant much time and energy was wasted maneuvering from one platform to another to accomplish basic daily tasks.

While re-evaluating how to help reps be more successful, O’Neill took a step back and assessed Eightfold’s sales tech stack as a whole.

She posed the following questions to identify areas of improvement:

• What purpose does each platform serve?
• How much are sellers using each platform?
• Can we get the same functionality with fewer platforms?
• Can we retire some contracts and consolidate?

O’Neill was already implementing a new sales learning solution from Mindtickle to create customized modules and inspire a culture of coaching. “Bar none: Mindtickle is the best sales enablement platform ever,” she said.

O’Neill and her team also recently launched Mindtickle’s content management system (CMS), Asset Hub, to replace its prior solution. With the team familiar with the Mindtickle interface and user experience, Call AI product made sense as an alternative to Gong — with the added benefit of living in the same solution as these other critical sales tools.

These functionalities, plus Mindtickle’s Salesforce integration, mean reps have a centralized solution to get things done quickly and more easily.

#2: Improving access & shareability

With the new tools in place, O’Neill wanted to ensure reps can access the information they need when they need it. Whether it’s learning materials, product content to share with customers, or notes about a particular account, everything lives in a single, unified solution, saving sellers hours finding what they need.

And it’s not just about individual reps turning up what they need; it’s also about sharing materials across the team for better collaboration while creating a smoother method for distributing content to buyers and customers.

“Sharing critical account data more easily amongst the team helps you have more productive conversations with your customers,” O’Neill said.

#3: Using tools to drive results, not punish people

The aim for any solution, including conversation intelligence, should be to help employees do their jobs more effectively. O’Neill positioned Mindtickle’s Call AI as a tool to support reps before, during, and after customer meetings, promoting how it gives reps the ability to:

• Automatically transcribe calls for future reference
• Follow up on outstanding items with context
• Eliminate unnecessary meetings
• Easily share meeting details internally for those who were unable to make the call
• Get others, such as account or customer success managers, quickly up to speed when handing off a deal or account

Rather than scrawling in a notebook during calls, reps can stay focused and productive with the peace of mind that nothing will slip through the cracks.

These recordings are also available for reps to review later, to self-critique and identify areas they were successful and where they could improve.

#4: Evaluating performance for deeper insights

As with any new system introduced to the team, leadership must assess performance over time to ensure team members are using it and that it’s having a positive impact on individual and team KPIs.

O’Neill has started using the Call AI reporting feature to view coaching metrics like reps’ average number of discovery questions asked per call and the average amount of time speaking versus active listening time, amongst other data.

Using these insights and cross-referencing them with sales numbers, O’Neill and the enablement team can identify skills and behaviors they want to reinforce, create a list of best practices for customer calls, and build training around those skills and behaviors.

More opportunity ahead for Eightfold

While O’Neill and the Eightfold sales and enablement teams have seen a lot of improvement in a short amount of time since implementing Mindtickle, there is still much opportunity. Streamlining is still top of mind, as well as using the platform to inspire a culture of coaching and leveraging Mindtickle’s predictive Sales Readiness Index.

O’Neill has been satisfied with her Mindtickle experience thus far.

“I have to be conscious about what the experience is like for the end-user,” said O’Neill. “Mindtickle gets people to content and insights faster while making our reps’ lives easier.”