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Join nowHow to mine thousands of hours of your reps' conversation data and turn it into usable insights.
By Erin Hueffner, Writer, Salesforce
July 2, 2025
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 selling, with the rest of their time going to administrative tasks such as managing their CRM, researching prospects, and training. To help reps regain that time, modern conversation intelligence uses AI to analyze 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 team.
Conversation intelligence tools support sales reps by recording, collecting, analyzing, and interpreting text, speech, and video data from customer interactions. It helps revenue teams, from executives to frontline salespeople, find out what's working (or not working) in pitches or at any stage of the sales cycle. It can be used to capture an aggregate of all team members and reveal opportunities for improvement. 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 analyze 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 practice at scale when they're based on hunches. Conversation intelligence software provides the data that supports your sales process, offers, and targeting.
Gaining insights becomes easy, because this 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.
Conversation intelligence software works like a notetaker, sales manager, data analyst, and more during your sales reps' calls. 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.
Choosing the best conversation intelligence software requires a thorough understanding of your needs and your existing sales apps. The following list of top picks was selected based on their high ratings and good user reviews on G2 and Capterra — two sites known for aggregating and rating sales software. Each has its own ways of rating productivity apps: G2 ratings are based on user satisfaction and ease of use, and Capterra ratings are determined by looking at ease of use, features, value for money, and customer service.
There are two types of conversation intelligence tools — those that are part of a larger suite and those that are standalone products. No matter the type, each product had to be rated near 5 stars on one of the two review sites.
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a leading sales CRM with many AI-powered features, including deep conversation intelligence tools. Einstein Conversation Insights lets you surface key moments from customer interactions to identify important trends. This AI-powered tool captures call data and delivers conversation intelligence directly in the flow of work.
Gong is a standalone conversation intelligence platform that ties its features into larger predictions about your future revenue. It finds at-risk deals, trends in progress, and more, using its native dialer and email tracking, plus to-do tasks and more. It syncs with popular CRM and scheduling tools to become the conversation intelligence portion of a complete sales suite.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales is an AI-powered CRM and ERP built into Microsoft's software ecosystem. It helps teams qualify leads, track conversations and deals, and more. Its conversation intelligence capabilities are unlocked in its Enterprise and Premium editions.
Hubspot Sales Hub is also a full sales platform tied to a number of core features, including a CRM, CPQ, call and email tracking, document tracking, and more. Its conversation intelligence features are built into its Sales Hub Professional Plan, though tracking specific terms and other advanced features requires the Enterprise edition.
Fireflies is a standalone AI-powered note-taking app that plugs into popular communications tools. It's able to record, transcribe, and analyze any call, separating speakers and analyzing their emotions. Everything is stored in a central database that uses AI search to locate whatever a team is looking for.
Fathom is another AI-powered note-taking app that plugs into video call platforms. It offers many free features like call transcriptions and summaries, plus paid features like integrations with project management and team communications. It lets users share clips of calls in their messaging apps, push transcriptions to note repositories, and more.
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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.
Today, conversation intelligence software is a must-have, not a nice-to-have. Here are some key reasons organizations choose to implement it.
Call recordings aren't all that valuable if there's no easy way to learn what happened in them. But with conversational intelligence software, 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 continually improve over time. This visibility also reduces the tension that can exist between management and sales reps over the question, "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 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 is this: If poor-quality sales data is fed in, you'll get bad data out — and the actions you take will be wrong. 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. For example, 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 obtainable. 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%.
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 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 helping achieve your goals and integrating with your tech stack, your conversation intelligence software needs to be user-friendly. Does it have a means to enforce use and to train 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 figure it out on their own. If the entire organization follows best practices in capturing and using data frequently, your conversation intelligence software can do its job.
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 puts you behind your competitors while they innovate as the market for these tools matures. Take advantage of the trend toward automating tasks so your superstar sellers have more time to do what they do best.
This article is for informational purposes only. This article features products from Salesforce, which we own. We have a financial interest in their success, but all recommendations are based on our genuine belief in their value.
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