[E93] Sales Tech Week: Conversational Business Intelligence

If you are a Sales Manager, you know that it is impossible to listen to all the calls that all your reps make each and every day.

At best, you can cherry pick the calls you know were either good or bad, and focus on those. But even that is difficult to do along with the other responsibilities you have to do.

Luckily, it’s 2019 – which means that there is now scalable technology built using AI, that helps process, analyze, and report on the calls from your team.

In this episode I cover how this tech works and some of my recommendations.

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Episode 93 – Transcript

What’s going on. Thanks for tuning into the sales experience podcast. My name again is Jason Cutters, so glad that you’re here.

Very excited. This week I’m talking about sales technology. If you have a tech stack, if you have something cool or innovative or exciting or interesting that you use at your organization and you’re actually willing to share it. Now I know a lot of managers, a lot of owners, they have cool technology, but they never want to share it.

They want to keep their stuff secret proprietary. Here’s the deal. There’s nothing new. There’s nothing interesting that’s not being worked on, not available, that’s not out there and so would love for you to share, come from a place of abundance.

I would love to find out what you’re using, if it’s something you’re using from a company, if there’s more companies that could use it and to help their team that would be great.

Yeah, reach out to me. Let me know. I would love to find out. I’m just a sales nerd. As you know, if you’ve listened to this show at all, and so I love getting all of these different pieces together, trying to figure out different ways to help sales reps, sales teams, organizations in any way possible, please let me know.

Send me a message. You can do it, Jason, at Cutter Consulting group.com. You can go onto the cutter consulting group.com website. Find me on LinkedIn, and if you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe to this podcast on Spotify, stitcher, iTunes.

You can download it on Sound cloud, Google play, and then also on the website where you can find all the transcripts as well. All right. For today’s episode, for the technology piece that I want to talk about today, let’s talk about conversational business intelligence. Now, what does that mean?

What that is technology mostly driven by artificial intelligence. That will take your phone call. That’s the conversational part. Yeah. It will take your phone call from your recordings, from your reps it, we’ll put it into their system and then what’ll happen is it will run different filters and programs against a catalogue of terms or rules that you have in place.

So the conversational part, right? Is it going to take your phone call conversations always after the fact. There is some technology for live processing of this, but it’s really expensive for most call centres. So we’re talking about recording calls goes into the system, AI goes through transcribes, it looks for all the rules that you have in place and then spits out a report.

The good technology out there will also timestamp that report. So it will say, here’s a call for your Rep. John had this phone call at this date and then here’s the timestamps of everything that we’ve highlighted.

Based on the rules that you have given us, how you’ve programmed the AI Bot and what you want it to do now, what does that look like? What kind of things can you program in? Well, the key is is that you can program anything you want in there. For the most part.

Yeah, you can have it check for the number of times a rep asked a question which questions they asked. If you know for your process there’s a set number of qualifying questions or discovery questions, you know they should be asking.

Then you can program those in there and then it will count and highlight and annotate when they asked or it could tell you which ones weren’t asked. You can also put in there terms that you want them to say throughout the conversation as well as terms that you don’t want them to say.

So if we’re talking about compliance, there may be terms that you do not want them to say under any circumstance or you know that fundamentally if they say certain terms that it could be a compliance issue. It might not be, but it could be.

So for example, free or upfront fee or anything like that that you know could trigger an issue, it will at least highlight and then find it.

The key value for conversational business intelligence software is that it replaces what a human would have to do by listening to every second of that phone call, and if we take a standard sales team, let’s say you had 10 reps and they’re on the phone five hours a day out of an eight hour shift, which is a lot of talk time, but let’s say it’s five hours each, that’s 50 hours of talk time per day that you would then have to listen to either yourself as a manager, your QA person or your compliance team.

It’s very easy to fall behind and start losing very quickly because it’s tough to do that at scale and so this kind of software does that. It takes place of the person who’s listening and highlighting it.

Now you still have to do something with the reports out the back end when it highlights and annotates John’s call and says, he said the word free had four minutes and 18 seconds. Yeah. Then somebody needs to then go in and listen to it, see if that was a good or bad instance, and then do some coaching or training or accountability for that.

So it’s not going to do all of it. It can’t actually manage or train your reps for you, but it can make the unsalable scalable by going through all of your calls and giving you a framework for what you need to do. It will give you the playbook or the action steps of what’s being served up that you can then manage with your reps.

And this software is so key. It’s so important because again, the alternative is a manual team who’s listening to it and then being subjective. I’ve seen compliance teams who have listened to calls and then there’s always a question. It’s always a matter of context and framework and then there’s still things that are going to get missed.

It’s tough as a human to listen to recorded calls every day, all date, day in and day out, and be precise, be accurate and not miss a single thing. And from a company standpoint, depending on what you’re in, especially if it’s financial services, especially if there’s something compliance related.

Yeah, business to consumer, then you’ve got to make sure you catch everything and that you’re always on top of it from a coaching standpoint and then also an accountability standpoint. No, we’re talking about software that I would recommend. Again, this is not a paid product placement.

None of these companies have paid me to mention them here in this. However, I do have some relationships with some of them in order to help companies with them, but the ones that I recommend call in, so Colin, so can l, ln refract is another great one, and then perform line.

All three of those plus many others out there would allow you to do that where you’re plugging into the phone system, [inaudible] recorded calls to your CRM in some way and you’re building this library of automation that’s going through your phone calls.

Now each of these companies, right, have different strengths, some different weaknesses. Yeah, they have different sizes. They work well. Call in and refract both are very scalable. So whether it’s one rep on up, so some of them have limits on how much recording you can actually put in their system, how much they will transcribed and give you back on the data.

Some have unlimited plans, some have more limited options. Perform line is a great one for compliance and sales, business intelligence on those calls. And usually it’s meant for bigger teams, especially financial services companies. And so all of those plus any other ones just look for conversational business intelligence software. There is some setup.

So if you’re going to look into these things as a sales manager, as an owner, just keep in mind the implementation can take a little bit because one of the things that has to do is it has to a learn from your phone calls, which can be done with AI, but then there’s also some programming that needs to be done from your side as far as the library goes, the words that you want, listen for the compliance words that you want them to find out that your reps shouldn’t be saying.

And so that takes some setup. That takes a little bit of time. And the right company that you’re working with will help you implement this both on the technology side as well as the AI side and get that all set up. If you’re gonna look at one of these solutions, the first thing I would do is look at some kind of free trial. Do they offer you a way to test it with some basic phone calls?

Now, obviously a free trial is not going to be all the bells and whistles. It’s not going to be fully amazing and detect everything in your phone calls, but you should have some ability to dump in some calls and see some kind of basis of what the AI’s gonna detect.

Now, if you’re working at more of an enterprise level, if you’re talking 2030 50 reps or above for this software, generally there’s no free trial, but they should give you a general idea, really good idea of what it should do with your calls and how operate and then some kind of break in period for the AI.

Then once you get this set up, make sure that once you hit the go button on this is that you’re working on this constantly to make sure that it’s learning. It’s detecting everything you want it to detect in your phone calls and one last feature I forgot to mention with this kind of software is that most of the good ones will also give you some analytics.

They will tell you things like how much of the time on a phone call did your salesperson talk versus the prospect for most sales calls, unless it’s like a demo or a presentation, most sales calls should have the sales reps talking a third of the time and the prospect talking two thirds of the time and so you can track that and see if your rep is talking too much too little and where that balance is. Right.

You should also see things like turns, which some companies call it flips, which is basically number of times a conversation flips back and forth between the prospect and your sales rep and so you want it to be a balanced conversation where it’s going back and forth.

This will indicate if your rep is doing a lot of monologues, so if there’s not a lot of flips, that means they’re talking a lot and talking and talking and talking and the other person’s just listening or is it a conversation back and forth where there’s a lot of give and take.

Your rep is asking a lot of questions. The other person’s answering, they’re information, they’re moving through a process.

Generally you’ll know what a healthy conversation looks like anecdotally based on those percentages so you’ll know what a good conversation looks like just by looking at the rep stats for a given call, so make sure that the software has something like that [inaudible] where there’s a dashboard, you can see some highlights, those insights from that phone call and how well it went by the numbers.

All right. Hopefully that helps. Again, if you want any help with this, if you have any questions, if you’re looking for recommendations, you want to know what’s best, let me know.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on this for years, and I do have some good recommendations that I can make for you based on the size of company, based on your phone calls, the number of calls that you have, the amount of talk time, the volume of conversations that your reps are going to be having on a daily basis, and many other factors. Again, you can reach out to [email protected] through the website. Yeah, or on LinkedIn.

Always, remember that everything in life is sales and people remember the experience you gave them.