Cold sales calls are almost as enjoyable as a root canal for most sales professionals. And to top it off, they’re not very effective. 

Sales calls are hard nuts to crack, and a lot can go wrong. 

As puzzling as they are, they are also important for setting a solid foundation for your relationship with the customers or prospects. There have been numerous tips, tricks, and hacks that claimed to help salespeople improve the effectiveness of their sales calls and provide better customer experience, but most didn’t work. 

But that is all in the past. 

Currently, we’re in the age of AI. Automation and AI have helped sales and sales teams in more ways than one. Conversation intelligence is one branch of AI specifically designed to help sales reps improve their sales calls and give sales managers a better overview of rep-customer interactions. Conversation intelligence empowers your virtual sales assistants to perform more tasks and provides you with better results.  

What is conversational intelligence all about?

Conversation intelligence is a form of AI that combines the power of natural language understanding, natural language processing, and machine learning with traditional tools like sales assistants, chatbots, and such, to assist customers and salespeople. The benefits of conversation intelligence in sales are undoubtedly plenty. Let’s go through some of these unparalleled benefits that can help you tackle major sales challenges that you face every day.

Five ways conversational AI helps accelerate your sales

Simplified sales call data storage and management

Salespeople spend about 9.8 hours a week seeking out information on prospects, and more than 30% of their overall time entering this information manually into the CRM systems. This manual, time-consuming data entry into the CRM systems is vulnerable to errors and inaccuracies. This approach is clunky, but it also poses problems in certain important situations.

As a result of inaccurate, manual updating of CRM, the sales managers often don’t have correct data, resulting in poor decision-making. Further, suppose you have to hire a new sales rep and need the old sales rep to give them a handover. If your CRM data is not properly organized and updated, the new salesperson will need to spend a lot of time on their own, learning things about different prospects from scratch.

 Needless to say - this ends up killing a lot of valuable time. Instead of connecting to new opportunities and building strong relationships with current customers, your new sales reps are now trying to figure out the jigsaw puzzle that is your sales and business data. 

Conversation intelligence stops this from happening once and for all. 

Virtual sales assistants armed with conversational intelligence can understand the context and meaning of natural language. Being automated in its approach, a virtual sales assistant ensures that all of your customer conversations are recorded, transcribed, and properly stored in an organized manner. Conversational intelligence also allows virtual assistants to summarize entire conversations, provide key takeaway points, and automatically input all of this data into the CRM. 

Standardized best practices and benchmarks 

Sales is all about iteratively improving your processes to foster shorter sales cycles and improved sales pipelines. And to do that, you need proper metrics, benchmarks, and best practices. Not all of your sales reps are the best performers, which is okay. It is on you to understand their strengths and weaknesses and devise a strategy that allows everyone to work from a singular platform. For this, too, standardized benchmarks and practices are extremely important. 

Allowing conversational intelligence to understand your sales calls and analyze all of your sales call data eases this process and makes it simpler for you to create benchmarks and monitor the performance of sales reps. That way, you get a chance to conduct comprehensive team reviews, have personalized sessions with sales reps to help them solve their challenges, and even create a handbook or SOP of best practices for all the future sales reps. 

This approach will foster a culture of growth and improvement in the long run. Sales teams will start organically recognizing their shortcomings, which will lead to brainstorming, discussions, and strategy modifications to optimize performance based on standardized benchmarks. 

Easy onboarding of customers and sales reps

Onboarding is a vital part of any sales process, and this stands true for both customer onboarding and sales reps' onboarding. Anything going wrong during the onboarding stage can have long-lasting impacts on their relationship with your business. As a result, your goal should always be to ensure hassle-free onboarding for everyone. 

You might be thinking - that’s easier said than done.

But no, not really. With conversational AI to boost your sales practices, it is as easily said as it is done. 

Conversational intelligence-enabled virtual assistants are the perfect partners for sales managers to set up smooth workflows and standardized processes. On the customer front, conversational intelligence analyzes your sales calls and understands the challenges your sales reps and customers faced during onboarding. 

Virtual assistants also work in real-time by analyzing current communications and raising flags and alerts whenever required, depending on your needs. These ensure that customer onboarding is simplified and sales reps are informed of the next best steps in real-time. 

No more lengthy, manual processes

Day-to-day sales calls require sales reps to spend a large portion of their time understanding the takeaways from calls, taking notes, performing data entry, and other mundane tasks. 

Conversational intelligence seamlessly automates all of these tasks so that your sales reps can focus on the conversation and not on all of these side tasks. This opens a lot of room for better relationships and faster conversions. This also gives your sales reps more bandwidth to focus on critical customer problems - those that actually require human intervention. 

Right from understanding your sales conversations and extracting key takeaways to taking notes and entering important data into CRMs - today’s virtual assistants have evolved to have it all under control. By integrating with your entire sales process, conversation intelligence-enabled tools provide real-time assistance, too, in more ways than one. 

To begin with, you can set benchmarks and thresholds beyond which the tool will raise alerts for the sales reps to take note of. You can also provide live assistance, cues, battle cards, and support to sales reps with the help of virtual assistants to foster quick conversions and tackle potential risks. 

The best part? All of this is automated - leaving your manual resources free for cognition-intensive, complex, more rewarding tasks while the virtual assistant efficiently takes care of all the repetitive tasks.

Intelligent call analytics and predictive insights

Conversation intelligence is all about understanding your sales calls, analyzing the data, and delivering predictive analytics and insights. The goal is to make sense of all of your data - including legacy and real-time - to help you make informed decisions. 

The use cases of conversation intelligence in call analytics are plenty - and all of these directly help you obtain useful insights to improve sales performance. 

Artificial Intelligence, in general, has primarily been about making predictive forecasts, and conversation intelligence brings this feature to your sales process - by making use of intelligent algorithms. The benefits can be levied to identify new customers, build ideal customer profiles, observe buying behaviors, understand interaction, etc. 

Another area where intelligent virtual assistants loaded with conversation intelligence play an important role is offering recommendations and suggestions. Both recommendations and suggestions are important and can play a monumental role in strengthening your relationship with the prospects or customers - given that the time is right! Predictive intelligence derived from conversation intelligence ensures that you know exactly when it’s the right time for your sales reps to make product recommendations, upsells, and cross-sells that have a higher chance of a conversion, to help you quickly close deals. 

Virtual sales assistant with conversational intelligence for the win

Evidently, conversation AI is extremely beneficial for sales teams. But how does this translate to day-to-day advantages? 

Let’s explore the answer to this question by understanding the advantages that virtual assistants provide to managers, sales reps, and customers on a daily basis. 

For sales leaders, managers, and entrepreneurs

Sales leaders and managers face many challenges day in and day out, and most of these revolve around managing and improving their sales processes. The challenges come in many forms - from difficulty in coaching sales reps to understanding and analyzing sales calls and much more. 

For any sales team to perform better, the manager must be able to coach both high- and low-performers properly. And, it is practically impossible to effectively analyze hundreds of sales calls daily. 

A conversation intelligence problem makes both of these challenges easily solvable:

• You get a complete overview of all of your sales calls, including how different sales reps are performing, what are some major bottlenecks, and more. This information can then be used to devise carefully planned coaching programs customized to the subjective skill level of the sales reps - so that the goal is to bring everyone on the same level and ensure everyone’s growth. 
• Analyzing sales calls is also simpler with virtual assistants that come with reporting and visualization abilities. You receive all the information in the form of easily understandable visuals like charts and graphs. 
• All in all, conversation intelligence-enabled sales assistant apps help you overhaul your sales processes by getting deeper visibility into every sales rep - customer interaction and analyzing how different objections are being met so that you can strategically plan the next steps. 

For sales teams, salespersons, and sales reps.

Sales reps and salespersons can greatly benefit from conversation intelligence in their day-to-day tasks. Right from their calls with your customers and potentials to entering data into CRMs and more - conversation intelligence empowers your sales teams to simplify all of these daily operations. 

Virtual assistants sift through sales calls to generate insight and provide your sales reps with live alerts, in-call assistance, suggestions, and other support. You can also set different benchmarks for tricky situations where you think it would be good to raise alarms. So, if your sales reps are spending more time talking and less time listening, your sales assistant can raise alarms and prompts to let them know to relax and slow down. 

Conversation intelligence also empowers virtual assistants to understand the context of the conversation - including tone, emotions, and such. This can be used to raise alarms and alerts for your salesperson in cases where the prospect’s emotions start becoming negative. It can also help sales teams stay proactive in their sales approaches and focus on personalization and building strong relationships. 

Conversation intelligence also makes it possible for virtual assistants to quickly take notes and extract key takeaways and transcriptions from your sales calls. All of the important data is then automatically entered into your CRMs and other business systems, as required, without any manual intervention. This saves sales reps a lot of time and helps them tackle bigger challenges and customer pain points. 

For customers and prospects

If your sales reps are happy and productive, your customers are likely to be the same. After all, conversation intelligence ensures that their queries are resolved quickly and efficiently without having to put them on hold. It also helps customers feel connected to your company because of all the personalization and customization that virtual assistants foster. 

Sales assistants also automate routine query answering. So, if your prospects come to your customer support with regular, easy queries, the sales assistants can quickly provide the answer as needed. In cases where the query is complex, the assistant immediately performs intelligent routing to match the caller with the perfect sales rep to take care of the problem. The result - your customers’ and prospects’ queries are resolved quicker than ever! 

Improve your conversations with conversation intelligence

Sales conversations are the building blocks of your customer relationships and customer engagements. If you want the relationship to be successful and long-lasting, you must take care of the building blocks and keep the foundation strong. One sure-shot way of doing that is by simplifying your sales communications and keeping them customer-centric instead of brand-centric. 

You need to understand your customers and prospects and assist them accordingly, tailored to their needs. Conversation intelligence is your stairway to that. And while we’re at it, conversation intelligence also simplifies and streamlines most of the other sales challenges for you, too, so that’s a bonus!

Get conversation intelligence for your business!

Conversation intelligence has tangible, transformative benefits for sales teams and processes. Our actionable conversation intelligence platform, Wingman, brings all of those benefits right to your business. Easily record and review calls, unlock insights from every sales interaction, simplify sales coaching and training, and build an overall healthy sales atmosphere - try out our demo today!