3 Ways Conversation Intelligence Improves Coaching, Training, and Selling

Artificial intelligence has entered the sales arena. And it couldn’t have come at a better time.

The shift to remote and now hybrid workforces dramatically affected how sales managers train and coach their reps. Already facing time constraints, managers have reduced visibility into seller activity and struggle to personalize coaching.

At the same time, when salespeople aren’t all in the same office, they can’t collaborate, overhear each other’s calls, or trade ideas easily. They often lack formal coaching support and want more training on how to communicate value to customers.

Sales managers need a way to enable every rep to be their best every single day. That’s where Conversation Intelligence comes in.

Conversation Intelligence uses artificial intelligence (AI) to record, transcribe, and analyze sales calls to generate recommendations—powering every aspect of sales enablement with data-driven insights into performance.

With access to data from Conversation Intelligence, sales managers can identify skill gaps, prescribe training to fix the specific behaviors that lose deals, extract best practices for their entire team, and keep deals moving through the pipeline.

Not only that, but Conversation Intelligence can help sellers master virtual selling, a strategy that is extremely effective but one that reps often struggle with.

3 Ways Conversation Intelligence Helps Sales Teams

With Conversation Intelligence software, sales managers can unlock the full potential of their sales teams and help them be as productive as possible. Here are three specific ways Conversation Intelligence helps sales teams:

1. Improve Sales Coaching

Conversation Intelligence allows managers to coach from “game tape,” observing exactly how sellers interact with buyers in the field, the precise language they use, how they describe the company’s value proposition, and how they handle (or don’t handle) objections.

Specifically, managers can use it to:

• Consistently assess every sales rep, regardless of location, to determine if they are achieving the necessary competencies for each stage of the buying cycle.
• Get an at-a-glance summary of reps who need attention
• Deliver personalized coaching recommendations, exercises, quizzes, and remedial learning content to help reps improve

Plus, Conversation Intelligence lets managers scale up their coaching. Listening to a 30-minute discovery call to provide feedback to a single rep is quick and easy. Scaling that up by a factor of 10 or 20—or more—is downright impossible. With Conversation Intelligence, though, managers can listen to many more sales calls and provide the personalized coaching sales reps need—and want.

2. Improve Sales Training

Conversation Intelligence provides data-driven insights to help sales managers validate sales learning effectiveness, identify areas that sellers must improve, and gain a new source of training content. This powerful tool helps teams create relevant, repeatable training processes that deliver reliable conversion outcomes.

Sales managers can use Conversation Intelligence data to:

• Spotlight top performers’ best practices, identify trends, and improve forecasting
• Uncover and understand skills gaps at an individual level, as well as the team level
• Evaluate how reps deliver messaging and product information
• Identify content that can be pulled from sales calls and added to sales training programs and sales content libraries

By knowing exactly where to focus their coaching efforts, sales managers are more effective—and efficient. And they have more time to focus on the most important things: motivating their teams, strategic planning, and driving revenue growth.

3. Improve Virtual Selling

As it analyzes communications between sellers and buyers (email, calls, and content), Conversation Intelligence brings to light topics important to the buyer. It can then recommend specific content for sellers to share with the buyer.

For example, Conversation Intelligence can identify what’s going on in a deal, detect if the deal is winnable, if competitors were named, and whether the buyer has agreed to move forward. And if the buyer is hesitant, a Conversation Intelligence tool can recommend content to drive the deal forward.

The tool can also:

• Uncover why deals are—and are not—progressing
• Observe seller effectiveness and gauge buyer engagement
• Listen to a sales rep’s delivery and the buyer’s response
• Detect buying signals and learn buyer objections

This type of automation streamlines the process, saves time, eliminates guessing, and helps advance and close deals faster.

Proof Conversation Intelligence Helps Sales Teams

Allego customer Arco needed better visibility into seller activity and consistent high performance from its reps. Data from Conversation Intelligence enabled the company’s Sales Performance Coach Ethan-Jak Anderson to quickly and seamlessly pinpoint learning moments during rep calls. This had an immediate impact on increasing the effectiveness of coaching sessions.

“In a seven-week period, we improved our ‘offer rate’ (product mentions per call) by 75%, adding an additional eleven sales per day to the bottom line. Allego has helped us measure and track this metric,” he said.

Conversation Intelligence also helped Anderson cut the time needed to prepare recordings for coaching sessions in half. Plus, he gained visibility into sales calls, allowing him to detect things he would have had trouble picking up if done manually, such as the pace of the conversation, the number of questions a rep asks, and overused stock phrases.

Anderson also added recordings of top performers’ calls, along with the evaluation of those calls, to the sales content library. This valuable resource allowed reps throughout the company to watch, listen, and learn what good looks like so they can work on improving performance on their own.

Conversation Intelligence enables sellers to take control of their own development—and on their own time. When they have a few free minutes, they can listen to their own calls and review the top performers’ calls and evaluations. It’s just one of many ways that Conversation Intelligence helps sales managers unlock the full potential of their teams to be as productive as possible.

Learn More

Download The Sales Conversation Intelligence Playbook to learn how Conversation Intelligence can help improve sales training, coaching, and selling for individual reps and your entire team.