In the sales and marketing realm, a professional's most important tool is their voice. It allows them to communicate ideas, interact with other individuals, and express thoughts and emotions.
However, there’s a big difference between communicating thoughts and ideas and having them heard and acted upon.
How can a sales rep ensure they’re actually listening to all the small details when talking to a prospect? Are they paying attention to the words the prospect uses? Their tone? The different ways to communicate an idea?
How can a marketing professional ensure their campaigns have the desired effect? Perhaps through interviews, but again, how can someone pay attention to details that usually go unnoticed by humans? At the end of the day, most humans have many things going on in their lives, and we rarely have time to sit back and analyze everything around us.
Marketing and sales professionals have used technology to their advantage for a long time, and the answer to these questions is no exception. The concept of conversation intelligence has been a game changer for a couple of years now, and it seems it will only get better from here.
What is conversation intelligence?
Simply put, conversation intelligence is artificial intelligence that is built to record and analyze speech. Once the speech has been analyzed, the software using this technology will show different statistics that aid in marketing and sales processes when it comes to understanding customer intention.
How Conversation Intelligence Works
This technology might seem complicated, but it is not. Most conversation intelligence software works as an add-on to Zoom, Google Meet, or another type of video conference software by recording the meeting audio. Once the recording has been analyzed, the conversation intelligence program shows data such as keywords, key themes, speech ratios, interactivity, call length, and sentiment. With those insights, you can decide the best route to take with specific prospects simply by gathering details from their voice.
How Conversation Intelligence Helps Sales
However, conversation intelligence is not only applicable to specific scenarios and/or prospects. In the sales game, it can also be used to know which sales pitches are driving more conversions or how customers react—either positively or negatively—to certain words or phrases. This information can later be used to train existing and new sales representatives to give them the best chance at closing deals.
How Conversation Intelligence Helps Marketing
For marketing purposes, it’s possible to use conversation intelligence to conduct interviews with key customers. For example, you can learn how a certain product or service has been working for them, or how they perceive a certain campaign or piece of content. Then, based on those insights, you can make business decisions to change things up in future campaigns or even decide to create A/B testing variables.
Plus, those benefits come from analyzing the way sales reps and their prospects are speaking. To say it’s impressive would be an understatement!
Which conversation intelligence programs are available?
Now you’re probably wondering what tools exist out there to create this analysis and further strengthen a sales and marketing strategy. Let’s look at three options.
1. Gong
This tool analyzes customer interactions and alerts you of potential risks or opportunities based on its artificial intelligence algorithm. According to Software Advice, one of the pros of Gong is its amazing customer service. They create a great experience from the moment you first talk to a representative to the moment you become a customer and beyond.
There were very few cons about this tool, and the few we found mentioned things such as Gong's inability to accurately transcribe what was said during a meeting and some minor issues with the Salesforce integration. Nonetheless, most people rated it 5 out of 5.
2. Chorus
This tool is Gong’s main competitor, and Chorus definitely does the trick for understanding customer sentiment overall.
Like Gong’s artificial intelligence, Chorus allows the user to record meetings (Chorus will appear as an additional guest in the meeting). After processing the recording, it’ll show statistics to help you understand customer intention better.
3. Salesloft
Salesloft is a conversation intelligence tool that provides meeting analysis to understand buyers better, and it’s also a powerful pipeline management tool that allows sales reps to communicate and organize everything during the sales cycle. Although compared to Chorus.ai and Gong, this tool falls third in line. The pipeline feature is a great add-on for sales teams.
Boosting your sales and marketing outcomes is not something that will happen overnight. Although it is a great way to get ahead of the competition, it doesn’t matter which technology option you choose if your sales reps are not ready to use it. Training and onboarding are very important when acquiring a new tool. Otherwise, it can quickly become a very expensive bill that will not pay for itself.
Conversation intelligence is the next big thing when it comes to sales and marketing—it will help sales reps to understand buyers better and build customized strategies to close sales faster.
If you want to learn more about how this and other tools can help you achieve your marketing and sales goals, take a look at our “The tech marketers guide to achieving inbound success" by clicking below.
