Challenge: Extracting value from all sales calls

Title: Conversational analytics

Industry: NA – Sales organizations/Functions

Conversation analytics

Advances in technologies like automated speech recognition, natural language processing, and machine learning now make it possible to look at huge samples of unstructured sales call data, and be able to know with greater certainty and precision what techniques sales leaders should invest in across their sales teams to drive better outcomes.

Research from conversation analytics shows that these five skills are highly predictive of closed sales in an inbound B2C environment.

• Disqualify poor opportunities
• Driving customer decisions
• Revealing objections
• Drive customer decisions by prescribing, not diagnosing
• Mitigating the risk of a purchase decision

B2C conversation analytics

The inbound call center has always been a significant revenue channel for B2C companies.

The pandemic has exacerbated the importance as companies look to make up for the decline in external sales meetings. As we move through the pandemic hybrid sales models are evolving across all channels. Remote conversations are here to stay, their success rates are taking on greater significance.

How do B2C companies and agents increase conversion rates to generate more sales than their peers?

Results from a predictive conversational analytics sales model ingesting data from more than 8,300 independent variables, tested against a data set of roughly 2.5 million sales calls from a dozen companies provide some interesting discoveries and insight.

Disqualify aggressively

A hallmark of high-performing B2B salespeople selling complex solutions is they don’t pursue poor fit prospects. Instead, they aggressively disqualify bad-fit opportunities from their pipelines in order to free up time to concentrate on those deals that have a real chance of converting

Revealing customer objections

High performers look to actively engage customers to surface unarticulated objections so that they can address these concerns head-on and overcome them.

Drive customer decisions by prescribing, not diagnosing

Converting casual shoppers into buyers is where inbound sales are won or lost. This represents one of the greatest points of leverage for a sales organization to boost performance.

High-performing sales agents focus less on diagnosing customer needs and more on prescribing solutions to customers offering personalized, prescriptive guidance to customers. “Personally, I would choose this package, or here is the plan I would go with”  had the greatest positive impact on conversion rates.

High performers know that taking orders from willing buyers is easy, but what really separates them from others is their ability to convert more on-the-fence shoppers into buyers on a short call. If you win on the margins you normally win overall; elections, sports, and in business…

Mitigate the perceived risk in buying decisions. Develop a sense of scarcity and urgency

Even when reps have prescribed a perfect offer to the customer and dealt with their concerns and objections head-on, clients may still need direction to get them to commit to a purchase – particularly when a call starts with some level of purchasing reluctance and customer predisposition to take more time to mull over buying.

The sales improvement opportunity from using these techniques is compelling. Often seen in B2C, but not typical in B2B sales calls;

• 16% of the calls looked at showed none of the “high-performer practices” being demonstrated. In those cases, conversion rates were poor.

• When all of these approaches were used, the study revealed there was a 70% conversion rate. Unfortunately, it was only in 1% of all calls.

For most B2C companies, getting sales reps to regularly use some of these techniques will translate into a great improvement in revenue generation.

Competitors insights

The insights from this new, relatively untapped data source are compelling. Companies have found that a large segment of clients calling into their queue enquired about products not offered by the company e.g. An insurance company fielding requests on specific vehicle insurance (RV) they do not offer, but competitors do. Companies launching a new service or product found they can leverage sales call data to understand which competitors customers speak of most, and apply the insights in their positioning, branding and new offer messaging.

As digital transformation continues, the guesswork involved in prior years is shifting as actionable insights from data delivered at speed provide greater alignment and improved results. Advances in data and analytics allow companies, employers, and employees to gain a granular, deeper level of insight into performance improvement.

Enabling Data-driven business models

In sales for example as we have seen it can provide (near) real-time insights. It can tell us which products and services of the company are consumed when, where, and by whom. It can help guide strategy to find the optimal price of a service and product.

Conversational analytics is part of an insights ecosystem

Salespeople or more broadly revenue roles should have the ability to act on information based on the activities of customers happening outside their CRM system: on Twitter, on Facebook, in customer service applications

Enabling those in relevant roles to take action in an integrated way using a rich data model that can infer intelligence from everywhere.

An AI insights engine, fueled by data can deliver real-time actionable insights across the entire value chain – all business activities – regardless of industry.