What Is Conversation Intelligence Software? A Complete Guide

Conversation intelligence software helps sales teams learn from their customer interactions across all channels so they can make the most of their selling time. And that time is scarce. The recent State of Sales report says reps only manage to spend 28% of their week actually selling, with the rest going to administrative tasks such as managing their CRM, researching prospects and training. Modern conversation intelligence uses AI to analyse each moment in the sales process and highlight useful insights for entire departments.

Read on to find out about some of the most important features of conversation intelligence tools, why you'd want to use them and how to set them up for your own team.

• What is conversation intelligence software?
• Why is conversation intelligence software important?
• How conversation intelligence software works?
• Key features of conversation intelligence software
• Benefits of using conversation intelligence software for salespeople
• Best practices for implementing conversation intelligence software with a sales team

Conversation intelligence tools support sales reps by recording, collecting, analysing and interpreting text, speech and video data from customer interactions. It helps revenue teams from the executives to the front line sales person find out what's working (or not working) in their pitch at any stage of the sales cycle. It can be used to capture an aggregate of all team members and see where there are opportunities for improvement. That way, your team can learn from past mistakes in a data-driven way and improve their results. In the past, what happened in sales calls was a kind of black box. Even if everything was recorded, management could only listen to so many of these calls and try to draw insights manually. But now, AI for sales helps analyse calls at scale to discover coaching opportunities and provide consistent feedback to reps.

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It's fine, in theory, to gain insights the old-fashioned way. But you can’t put your insights to practise at scale when it’s based on hunches. Conversation intelligence software provides the data that supports your sales process, offers and targeting.

But getting this data isn’t easy. Conversation intelligence software can find and populate information in your CRM without the need for manual data entry. That helps sales reps make the most of their time by providing prospect information and conversation suggestions in real time during their calls.

All of that can lead to major benefits for your team. The State of Sales Report found that conversation intelligence features led to major improvements in sales performance: 39% of respondents cited understanding their competition better, 39% enjoyed better visibility into sales rep activity and 40% understood customer needs more thoroughly.

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Conversation intelligence software works like a notetaker, sales manager, data analyst and more in calls with your sales reps. The tools join sales calls and measure important details like how long each person talks, conversational sentiment and keywords your company deems important. The tools can interact with reps in real time, noting insights such as, "Here’s the competitor battle card you can use since it was brought up and here’s how to address their specific questions around differentiation.

Conversation intelligence was originally about recording conversations. But now, it uses AI for sales and machine learning (ML), along with natural language processing (NLP) to transcribe and assess conversations as they go.

After calls, the data is accessible for sales reps and their managers as metrics and summaries that make it easy to review calls at scale. The tools also score prospects and reps and aggregate rankings for entire teams.

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Conversation intelligence platforms need several different components to deliver full value to a sales team. Data collection, analysis and delivery are each vital and have several sub-features.

• Call recording: Record all voice and video calls in their entirety and store them ideally in the cloud in a central platform that can be accessed by all other features of the tools. Sales reps can review their calls in their CRM and sales managers can look at calls across teams for broader insights.
• Automatic transcripts: Skip tedious, time-consuming and error-prone call-logging and note-taking with transcripts that attribute the correct voice to the correct speaker. Let sellers spend more time selling.
• Aggregation with other data: Integrate your recordings and transcripts into the customer's CRM profile so it's clear how what they talked about with reps is reflected in their past and future actions on the site, in emails, on social platforms and more. With all details in one spot, reps have an easier time recalling important details without digging around next time they speak to a customer. That helps them build better connections for more-likely sales.

• Keyword listening: Define and flag important moments in each conversation, such as mentions of a competitor, a feature, pricing, a known objection or contact details important for closing. These can be grouped and analysed more easily.
• Sentiment analysis: AI can listen for tone, inflection and pauses and watch for facial cues to determine likely attitudes and feelings in each part of a call. This helps identify signifiers of buying intent. If someone is showing concern despite saying pleasant words or trying to hide obvious excitement about a feature, you’ll be more aware and able to take action.
• Performance measurement: Score calls based on shared metrics to predict likely outcomes. This helps managers know where to train more and allows reps to prioritise their efforts.
• Call trend summary: Find trending topics in sales conversations based on the frequency of mentions over time to help plan new call scripts and playbooks.

• Call summaries: Keywords, sentiment analysis and machine learning can help to generate easy-to-digest call summaries for sales reps and managers to review at a glance. Then they can draw broader insights to drive company-wide sales strategy.
• Action items: Auto-populate a list of tasks for sales reps after a call, along with follow-up notifications. They can be reminded of important parts of the conversation to revisit and be assigned tasks in the CRM, such as tracking down information they promised to share and scheduling follow-ups. This saves a great deal of valuable selling time and makes it less likely that important tasks will slip through the cracks, resulting in churned leads.
• Coaching: Set up your tools to flag and surface certain calls for managers, such as conversations that resulted in a lost deal where the prospect mentioned your top competitor. That way, they can focus on coaching and lifting up the reps who really need it and form better talking points about the advantages of your offering compared with your competitors'.
• Conversational AI: What is conversational AI? It's a part of conversation intelligence software that acts as a personal assistant.
• Rather than having to remember keywords or types of resources to search through on a cloud drive, sales reps can chat with the AI in a "conversational" way to find information about their calls and customers. Learn more about steps to picking AI chatbots.

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At this point, conversation intelligence software is a must-have, not a nice-to-have. Here are some of the key reasons organisations choose to implement it.

Call recordings aren't all that valuable if there's no way to learn what happened in them. Teams can see important moments, trends and metrics at a glance through call summaries and dashboards. With common objections and questions highlighted, sales teams can develop stronger strategies and sales playbooks that continuously improve over time. This visibility also reduces the tension that can exist between management and sales reps over the question of, "How did that call go?"

The biggest value of these tools is in training your reps. You can help reps know what they should talk more or less about based on their calls versus all other calls. Plus, you can strengthen your quality assurance, using the tools to identify common errors and inaccuracies from sales reps by simply searching for those terms. Before, managers had to focus their efforts on their strongest performers, giving the A students special treatment that only widened the gap. But now the C students can take advantage of sales performance management software, which helps everyone and improves the department's overall performance.

One of the biggest challenges of any tool if poor-quality sales data is fed in is the actions you take will be wrong and you'll get bad data out. But conversation intelligence software helps you immediately start creating clean data by automatically highlighting true insights and generating the correct information and tasks for reps.

With data-backed insights into how calls are going and how similar calls have often ended up, your sales forecasting on win-lose rates is far better. It might accurately reveal that your sales pipeline is filled with poor prospects. But once you identify a problem, you can fix it.

These benefits are completely realisable. Take the case of a popular food delivery app. Conversation insights helped sales reps view transcripts from voice and video calls and provided trends and coaching to help improve future conversations with prospects. They saved time and increased productivity by more than 20%. This also fed into their engagement solution, which gave automated prompts to guide reps on when to make calls, send emails or engage on social media. Their sales activity increased by 25%.

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Whether you're starting from scratch or upgrading your conversation intelligence solution, here's how to do it right.

Before you do anything else, complete this sentence: “When we implement this, we want the team to be better at _________.” You need to fill in this blank with meaningful goals. For example, “uncovering how competitor X is stealing all our customers." As you fill in the blank, think of a specific use case to guide your work.

Take stock of all your existing sales data and processes along with your technology stack. Consider the tools you need to integrate with (such as a CRM) and the places where you see gaps in the process. Have representatives from the sales team, their management, sales ops and sales enablement put together their requirements.

Aside from enabling your goals and integrating with your tech stack, your conversation intelligence software needs to be user friendly. Some of your reps will love it and dive in but others won't. Has it got a means for enforcing use and for training reps to become more confident and appreciate its benefits? Find out the moments that make it click. If your reps don’t use the tool, you won’t see the benefits. That’s why it’s so critical to include your sales team in the decision-making process.

Make sure you support your team when you roll out the conversation intelligence tool. To do this effectively, you need a strong training and enablement function for using this software. Don’t expect your reps to just figure it out on their own. If the entire organisation follows best practices in capturing and using data frequently, your conversation intelligence software can do its job.

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Conversation intelligence software helps you mine the thousands of hours of conversation data your reps generate and turn it into repeatable wins and usable insights. Leaving that on the table is a missed opportunity that leaves you further behind your competitors while they continuously innovate as the market for these tools matures. Take advantage of the trend toward automating the tasks humans can't complete, leaving your superstar sellers to do what they do best.

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