*Reposted from the Pickle blog I wrote for a targeted keyword demand gen campaign*

What is Conversation Intelligence?

The Problem

Every customer & prospect conversation is jam-packed with information & data.

From product ideas, competitor intelligence, to marketing copy.

There's enough gold in these conversations to make Scrooge McDuck blush.

Sales teams only have two ways to capture this data: notes & recordings.

Notes, unless consistently accurate & detailed, are impossible to scale & translate to anyone other than the rep who took them.

Recording the meeting is the clear winner: it's scalable, context-rich, & easy to enable.

Unfortunately, this solution only treats the symptoms, not the disease:

• Sales pros find it difficult to surface key moments in every half-hour-long Zoom meeting. True needle in the haystack stuff.

• Leaders prefer watching paint dry over reviewing every conversation.

The result: 1 out of every 20 conversations are used just for coaching. The rest were banished to exist on dimly lit backroom servers for all eternity.

Transcripts are a valuable addition to this process. But replace "reviewing" with actually reading the text of every conversation & you've got nightmare material.

The Solution

Enter conversation intelligence software (C.I.)

New technology that automatically records, transcribes, & analyzes every conversation.

Allow me to re-phrase with less marketing jargon:

• Step 1: A conversation intelligence tool automatically records your Zoom meeting (or other video conference platform). Focus on the conversation while it's all captured. With a simple click, drop a pin or quick notes during any important topic & jump back to that timestamp post-call.
  
  

• Step 2: After hitting "End" on Zoom, the conversation is pulled into the platform & transcribed. Search & access the recording with ease. Play the video & transcript (broken into participants) from any point by clicking on any point or pinned timestamp. Clip & share moments across the team.
  
  

• Step 3: Using AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP), analytics & intelligence are applied to every conversation. The machine will help identify insights like competitor mentions, feature requests, action items, etc.

How Conversation Intelligence is Useful for Sales Teams

Use Case Breakdown - Team Size

There's a stigma that you need to be a large company to benefit from conversation intelligence software.

This may be true for enterprise platforms, like Gong & Chorus, which specialize in revenue intelligence. But conversation intelligence can & should be utilized by companies at any stage.

Pre-Seed Founding Stage (1-3 person startup)

Founder-led sales & customer support

Are you a one or two-man band? Playing every instrument between sales, customer support, & product.

For starters, we salute you & know exactly how you feel.

Capture & surface crucial conversation details to close that first big deal or prevent an early customer from churning.

We're talking about the difference between securing a funding round or closing up shop.

Don't leave recalling those details to a subconscious mental note.

Re-live user interviews like they just happened, spot consistent trends, & share feedback with your co-founders.

Seed Stage Team (2-5 sales reps)

A small team of full-cycle sellers (prospecting to onboarding)

You closed your seed round & the startup graduated from founder-led sales to a small squad of full-cycle sales pros. Congrats!

But as the late, great Biggie Smalls said: "Mo' money...mo' problems".

The founders have moved up to large roles and managing actual people now. You don't have time to be as involved in every deal these days.

What do you need?

High-Quality Sales Experiences

You're likely competing in a crowded space. If features are comparable, the main difference between your startup & the popular competitor is the relationship created between the buyer and sales rep.

Gift your team the power to be 100% focused on the buyer conversation, not taking frantic notes. C.I. will enable them to actively listen in discovery, crush demos & win consistently.

Build the Sales Playbook

Leadership will need to document every aspect of the sales process based on what is working.

Building talk tracks, use case info, & training data will be imperative for new hire onboarding as the company scales.

Compile clips from past demos & customer interviews to maximize every coaching opportunity.

Series A/B Growth Teams (5-50 sales reps)

Multiple sales teams. Hand-off from SDR to Account Executive.

Now things are really cooking in a faster, repeatable model. Quota & revenue goals have increased tenfold.

The hiring spree has broken into multiple teams. The first sales pros you brought on have been promoted to manager positions.

Top funnel meetings are now managed by dedicated SDRs who hand off qualified opportunities to Account Executives to begin the sales process.

What do you need?

More Visibility & Training

With the predictable cycle in place, you need a clear view & insight into what's leading to positive impacts or negative outcomes.

Which cold call value prop is best & leading to more booked meetings?

What's the ideal talk ratio between our team & the prospect in discovery? Best questions?

Does the demo hold a prospect's attention? Where's the drop-off?

Conversation intelligence can identify these learning moments. Making it a breeze to implement strategy, coaching, & sharing insights across the organization.

Better CRM Data Entry

Clean CRM intelligence is crucial at this stage of the business. You could navigate lax entry standards as a small operation, but not anymore.

Relying on sales pros to log every customer interaction in the same way & on time is pipe dream behavior. (As a salesperson, I approve this message)

It's like hoping a kid learns how to clean their bedroom on their own.

You might be surprised, but it typically gets worse before their work improves.

Some people enter "War & Peace" novels. Others are keen to provide key business insights like "FU" or "Use someone else".

With accounts changing hands frequently & higher turnover, accurate context right from the start will make a difference in performance.

Conversation intelligence software delivers the context of every past customer interaction with perfect accuracy.

Anyone in the business can re-live conversations as if they were a part of them through time-stamped notes, & machine-labeled topics.

Enterprise Organizations (50+ sales reps)

Multiple divisions, even more managers

The business has grown to a massive size. You are scaling to new verticals & markets.

With constant new offerings, service updates, & employee changes; a single source of truth is required: customer intelligence.

What do you need?

Predictable Revenue & Drive Performance

Everything needed in the Growth stage will be stretched even further.

Marketing, engineering, & leadership have to understand what's driving new revenue.

• Where are we losing to competitors?

• How can we ensure leaks in the pipeline are sealed?

• Are new learnings & customer intelligence easy to access anywhere?

Leveraging AI & conversation intelligence will help provide key insights into what's working & what's not. Follow patterns & trends in seconds.

Ensure Coaching and Process are Followed

Managers have to analyze & learn how to maximize team performance.

With huge budgets, it's no longer about what tool can we afford. It comes down to how accurate is the intelligence provided.

In order to effectively coach, understanding exactly where prospect conversations take a turn for better or worse is the only option.

Utilizing intelligence tools to surface these small game-changing moments is imperative to learn & adapt.

See Conversation Intelligence in Action!

If you hate:

• Deal-winning info fading away because you couldn't write fast enough.

• Taking frantic notes, instead of focusing on the conversation.

• Not understanding the heck that CRM note means.

• Reviewing entire conversations or reading transcripts to coach better.

• Repeating mistakes that lose customers because you failed to learn.

• Having to manually explain every feature request to developers.

• Guessing what your customers love or hate about the product.

  
  

Then you should consider taking a look at Pickle. Check it out today!