Conversational Intelligence: The Reel You Need To “Hook And Loop In” Buyers

As per a 2021 research study, it has been observed that in more than 60% of all B2B sales conversations the seller loses focus on the actual selling bit. Part of it comes to the timing of the message delivery. But most of the time, it happens because the seller focuses on educating the buyer and pushes the capabilities of the proposed product or solution throughout the sales pitch. They are unable to understand the buyer's need and intent and sell according to that.

As revenue generators, sales reps need to effectively communicate with their customers using not just high-quality content but also a pre-notional understanding of what the customer wants and when. This is where it is believed that sales conversations need to go back to basics of "hook and loop" tactics to get the necessary pull in from the buyer to reel them into the conversation.

Over the years, sales teams have been struggling to build intelligent conversations with their customers. These conversations should ideally feel like reading your customer's mind and positioning the right kind of solution that instantly piques the customer's interest.

With most of the sales conversations now happening on virtual platforms, it is easy to capture this data and understand exactly what will resonate with your customers. Sales reps, especially during their in-flight opportunities, are continuously burdened with the below questions about their interactions with the customers:

• What is the overall sentiment of the conversations that I am having?

• What is the benchmark talk ratio of sales vs. prospects for won deals and lost deals?

• Are we engaged with the key decision-making stakeholder, or do we need to tap others who can help propel the deal forward and close sooner rather than later?

• Who is currently in the competing vendor space from the buyer’s perspective?

• Is my conversation multithreaded or single-threaded?

• Am Iefficiently collaborating with all the parties involved in the deal?

As we recover from the aftermath effects of the pandemic and enter into the new normal, virtual sales conversations are taking precedence over F2F meetings. As per a recent study by Mckinsey, more than three-quarters of buyers and sellers say they now prefer digital self-serve and remote human engagement over face-to-face interactions. This sentiment has steadily intensified even after lockdowns have ended.

Thus the power of meaningful conversations has increased more than ever in this new business environment, and it supplements the strategies of revenue leaders who constantly face the dilemma of answering questions, such as:

• How many quality leads are getting lost in the pipeline before they actually reach the conversion stage?

• How can the sales team perform more productively, especially when most of their conversations now lack the in-person connection that influenced the deal highly before the pandemic?

• How can each salesperson be the most efficient they can be in their sales activities?

• How can the gap between the least and the best performing reps be optimized to drive the best overall outcome for the team?

If you are not able to answer the above questions as a revenue leader, it is enough to get you worried about considering a potential revenue loss.

Leverage Conversational Intelligence To Strike The Right Conversation At The Right Time

A possible answer to help you address the above concerns is having a sophisticated mechanism or tool to navigate and interpret vast mounds of your sales conversations intelligently. It is humanly impossible to dissect every call to its full potential. With Conversational Intelligence (CI) software at the heart of your sales team’s activities, your sales team can perform the quality assessment of 100% of their calls.

A growing number of marketing and sales executives are recognizing the value of conversations in bolstering the lifetime value of each customer. Conversations comprise the "first-person" data and metadata that will emerge as the preferred, perhaps exclusive, key to a "360-degree view" of each customer. This will provide a mechanism for recognizing the intent of customers based on their own words in context.

A standout advantage of using conversational intelligence for your sales team is that it helps set performance and quality standards and benchmarks. Top performing companies which use CI to guide their sales activities see practical benefits that influence their operational performance indicators. Some of these benefits are:

Recognizing Buyer Intent During Sales Conversations

If sales reps are given a platform which recognizes key decision makers from the buyer group, the key words and topics, overall sentiment and level of engagement during the sales conversation, they can use these insights to pitch the solution in the right manner to their prospects.

This is exactly how a CI guided platform transforms a regular sales conversation into a customer-centric conversation. This increases the seller’s chances to bring his deal over the line quickly.

Conversational intelligence guided sales calls leverage AI capabilities like a Natural Language Processing engine (NLP) to recognize buyer intent from sales conversations and help sales reps to determine the most viable deal structure for their customers.

Deal Collaborations Across Teams

As we overcome the effects of the pandemic, various teams throughout the sales journey of a deal need real-time collaboration especially when team members sit across various geographies and time zones. Deal war rooms and targeted collaboration workspaces can help cross teams from sales, engineering, etc. with an integrated channel of communication to collaboration in real-time and get the deal over the line in the best possible way.

Sales Coaching Based On Real-Time Performance And Benchmarks

When you understand how your top-performing sales reps sell, their talk ratios during deal conversation, their buyer interactivity and feedback scores, you know exactly which behaviors help win more deals.

A CI software helps organizations establish data-backed patterns and best practices. The automated call transcripts and analysis help sales managers and leaders quickly identify key development areas for reps. Managers can use these to provide customized coaching to the reps and improve their client conversations and overall performance. Over time, these insights can also help organizations to create a standard Sales Playbook.

Conversational Intelligence helps revolutionize how sales teams approach revenue performance and reemphasize what the primary intent behind effective sales conversations should be all about which is “hooking and looping in your buyers to your products”. Sales and revenue leaders leveraging a CI tool automatically push towards optimizing the resources spent on sales coaching and intensive sales onboarding while also making their sales team the best in class in delivering a supreme customer experience through AI-powered insights.

To learn more about how Aviso AI with its conversational intelligence solution Aviso Sense can help your sales team to achieve maximum productivity in their sales engagements kindly have a look into this Essential Guide for deeper understanding.

Click here to book a demo with us and see Aviso Sense in action.