Authentic Persuasion Show

[E93] Sales Tech Week: Conversational Business Intelligence

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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.

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.

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Authentic Persuasion ShowBy Jason Cutter
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