What we do at PartsBase

PartsBase, Inc. operates the world's largest B2B online parts locator service for the aviation, aerospace and defense industries. As of today, our members do over 51,000 part searches a day and PartsBase.com receives over 2.8 million page views a month. Our membership is over 7,600 companies strong and usage spans over 200 different countries and growing.

The main problem we solve with Wingman

At PartsBase, we firmly believe in sales enablement as a discipline. We see it as a way to make our sales team and our sales organization more effective in terms of not only in our ability to generate business opportunities for us, but also to effectively articulate the value of our solution to our customers.

Given this context, Wingman gives us the ability to essentially participate in every single conversation that takes place between our sales organization and our customers. We can see how sales executives are navigating through different scripts or conversations and specifically which topics are being covered. 

And once you integrate all the information we get out of Wingman into our CRM and sales performance dashboards, it's very easy for us to correlate the quality and content of those conversations with different performance indicators. For instance, the number of deals that a particular executive or team is closing by month or the effectiveness of those deals going through our sales funnel, which is another important performance indicator for us. 

If we connect all the information that we get out of Wingman to our other sources of sales performance, I can identify very interesting trends which ultimately tell the story of which sales executives are successful versus those who need more training.

How PartsBase benefited from Wingman

We use Wingman's API to pull all the data that the platform generates – calls, transcripts, all the intelligence that you extract from the calls, the scorecard information – and bring it into our data lake. And from there it goes to two places:

• It goes back to our CRM so anyone in the organization can go to a particular call on Wingman to look at the transcript or any other metrics.  
• We use the Wingman data to generate a sales performance dashboard. We aggregate all the information based on individuals and teams, and we look at different aspects of their performance. For instance, the different topics that were covered in a given conversation in a specific threshold. We also look at other elements in terms of comparing – how different sales people are conducting calls, the ratio between monologues versus actual conversations, or how they're engaging the customer.

Wingman participates in our sales funnel from day one – the initial contact we try to make with the lead till the day that the deal is closed. All of those conversations are analyzed and recorded on the CRM through Wingman.

Our sales process is not that different from what you would see in any other SaaS product company. We get literally hundreds of leads coming in every week. So that's really the starting point for, I would say, between 70-75% of the sales opportunities that come our way. From the minute that that lead makes it into the system and we try to make the first contact, Wingman comes into the picture.

As I mentioned, Wingman is integrated into our CRM. So any conversation that is recorded and analyzed by Wingman, it makes it into the CRM. Then it goes through the funnel until it becomes an actual opportunity. We always have the ability to go back to the Wingman recording and see the quality of the conversation at any stage of the funnel. 

Another important element of how Wingman helps enhance our ability to have good conversations with our customers is by giving us the opportunity to measure the ratio between IVR calls and video calls. We have already identified some very positive trends in terms of sellers leaning more on video calls versus IVR calls to have better conversations with the customers. There are multiple elements to consider, but in general, we can definitely see that the utilization of video calls is helping us a lot by enhancing our ability to close deals faster. 

In terms of how conversational intelligence is helping us to accelerate our sales is looking at Wingman's analysis of our sales calls. We can easily see if a sales executive is covering all the different elements in terms of introducing the different topics that they're supposed to cover in that call, next steps, value proposition etc. Call analysis helps us make sure that every call has a good balance between all such elements. 

We have definitely seen better chances of closing those deals, not only faster, but with a greater value for us and for the customer. 

Wingman for sales coaching

We hundred percent rely on Wingman's data to tell a sales executive, “Hey, you're doing a good job!”, “we need to improve here”, or “these are the trends that we want you to continue using as part of your customer interactions.”

It's extremely critical for us that our people know when to use a specific argument or specific messaging around our value proposition. And Wingman definitely helps us in that regard. For example, we use it in two moments: 

• A sales executive could use battle cards like an assistant when you're having those critical conversations with the customers.
• The other side of it is game tapes. Once you have a particular sales executive who achieved a certain level of proficiency, or even excellence, in terms of handling specific critical moments during customer interactions, you can create curated game tapes out of those calls for the rest of the team to learn.

What happens after we import data from Wingman to our sales performance dashboard

Each manager gets together with every one of their sales executives every single day to look at their previous day’s performance and what they're going to be focusing on that day. 

For us to be able to do this every day with every member of the team, we have to have a way to aggregate all of those performance indicators under a single pane of glass. Otherwise, it will be very time consuming and essentially we would spend all day coaching, right? So the ability to go to that sales performance dashboard and say, “Okay, out of the 30 calls you had, you know, X number of calls went beyond the two minute mark,” is huge for us. 

Once you get the fundamentals in place you can start fine tuning:

• Look at the content of the conversations
• See keywords and know what topic the conversation was focused on
• See the average number of questions in a call
• Check the talk to listen ratio for AEs
• Score calls

And all of the dashboards and information is available to the sales executives as well. It's not just the manager telling them that this is what they need to be focusing on or these are the different areas where they need to do better or continue doing this. But it's also giving the sales executive the ability to see for themselves how they are performing at any given time during the day. I think that's extremely beneficial for them as well. 

And the other thing to remember about sales coaching is that sales people are very competitive. So the way that we've aggregated our sales performance dashboard is in such a way that the sales executives can see how they are ranking in regard to their peers.

So if they see that John Doe is having twice as many sales as them, they can go into Wingman and watch the tapes for that person and see how they're handling specific critical moments during customer interaction that allows them to have more sales.

Wingman for onboarding new sales executives

Another area where we get a lot of value from the Wingman solution is onboarding new sales executives. We have an onboarding program for new sales executives where we ask them to spend a lot of time on Wingman, watching curated game tapes. Because it is not only the real time assistance, but if you watch and re-watch those tapes on a regular basis, you can learn a lot.

New sales executives can prepare much more efficiently for upcoming calls if they see real world scenarios of how seniors members of the team handled a similar deal. For a specific type of customer, we might ask someone to go and watch a particular game tape from this time, for this particular topic.

Wingman's ability to create and classify game tapes is huge for us.

So, would I recommend Wingman?

Before we decided to get into a partnership with Wingman, we looked at some other solutions in the conversational intelligence arena. The one thing that I can tell you is that in terms of cost and value proposition, Wingman is a solid investment with tangible return. Overall, it has been a great experience working with the Wingman team. 

Being a fairly new product, there have been some situations where the Wingman platform has not performed as expected; but in my experience, you don’t define success or failure when things go wrong, but what do you do from that point on? So in that regard I have to say that Wingman has been a great partner as well.