International Consulting Firm Leyton Sees 97% of New Hires Hit Target Using Allego Conversation Intelligence

Situation: Training a Global Sales Force

Leyton is an international consulting firm that helps businesses leverage financial incentives to accelerate growth and achieve long-lasting performance. In the past year, Leyton helped its clients claim more than $500M in tax relief to support their future growth.

Prior to adopting Allego Conversation Intelligence, the professional life of Leyton’s Director of Talent Development James Swift was an exercise in hoping for the best. Swift tried to provide his salesforce with the knowledge and skills they’d need to thrive. Once the training was done, however, it was difficult to know how—or if—they were applying that training in the real world.

Challenge: Gaining Insight into Training Impact

“My biggest headache is trying to understand what’s landing in that fast-paced environment,” said Swift. “That’s been my life—trying to break down the barrier between what’s happening in training and what’s happening in the field, and getting enough visibility to determine what’s working. How are customers actually reacting to the techniques that we’re training?

“We introduce a new product, and the salespeople just go with it. If you ask them, ‘How are you selling it?’ the answer might be, ‘I’m just having a conversation with the customer.’ How can I scale ‘just having a conversation’ across the entire organization?”

In the last two years, the need for greater visibility into the sales process has become more acute. The company has gone from selling a single core product to selling five products. In addition, Leyton recently broadened its market from smaller clients to larger corporations that were being served by the competition. The sales team needed much more market intelligence to engage these new buyers.

Solution: Implementing Allego Conversation Intelligence

To meet these challenges, Swift turned to Allego Conversation Intelligence. Allego’s AI-drive software analyzes sales calls to extract insights on the topics discussed, questions asked, pace of speech, filler words used, competitors mentioned, and much more. With these insights, Swift can better understand how to optimize customer interactions to increase the chances of a successful outcome.

“I can now measure and get visibility over what’s happening in the field. I can now tell whether these sales techniques are working or not.”

Initially, Leyton rolled out Allego Conversation Intelligence to the inside sales team, with a focus on how long it takes new hires (“new joiners”) to book their first meeting—a metric Swift had been tracking for years.

“The only thing we changed was implementing Conversation Intelligence and getting our managers to use it to coach more effectively,” Swift said.

Results: Faster Ramp Time, More Meetings, Higher Conversion Rates

After implementing Conversation Intelligence, new hires’ average time to a first meeting was reduced by 10 to 15 days.

Swift began measuring the average number of meetings booked per full-time employee (FTE). Before Conversation Intelligence was introduced, the average was 6.3 meetings per FTE by Month 6. But as soon as Leyton implemented Conversation Intelligence, the curve started shooting up around Month 4. By Month 6, the average was 11 meetings per FTE.

“By closing the gap between what’s happening in training and what’s happening in the field, we were able to double the output of that particular team,” Swift said.

Following this success, Swift and his team wanted to identify the percentage of new hires within each training group who reached their target over the course of six months.

“Pre-Conversation Intelligence, we were hitting 70% over six months. We didn’t think that was too bad. But after Conversation Intelligence, 97% of new joiners were hitting their target within that six-month period. Bang!

3 Keys to Success: Efficiency, Data, Scale

Swift credits three Allego-powered improvements for Leyton’s success.

Greater Efficiency and Better Coaching: First, he used Allego Conversation Intelligence to enhance the efficiency of the coaching process. Rather than having managers listen in on sales calls for hours at a time, Allego enables coaches to identify the most relevant problems and opportunities in far less time.

“Our guys used to sit next to somebody and say, ‘Let me listen to your calls for a couple of hours.’ Then they might coach some random things because they didn’t really know what they were looking for,” said Swift. “The biggest bit of feedback from our managers is that Allego makes the process much easier. They can schedule coaching in their diaries. They’ve got the calls ready to coach, and they go through and coach those calls every day. We enabled our managers to provide more and better coaching.”

Insight into Best Practices: The second key, which Swift had not anticipated, was the utility of all the data that Allego provides. Using this information, he was able to develop new best practices for coaching, determine which managers were using it, which managers weren’t, and how their teams’ performances compared.

“We were able to see how many calls were being listened to per manager, how many managers were giving feedback, how many managers were tagging calls and feeding back to their staff. Through that process, we were able to define our coaching guidelines so we could scale.”

Swift is also able to monitor the salesforce’s pursuit of larger corporate clients. “That was our big push, strategically. We wanted everybody to go after the business of other people. But how could we actually find out who was doing what?”

Now Swift gets a monthly report that shows when and how many competitors’ names come up in calls every single month per rep. He can see which reps are going for larger accounts. He can also see the average length of a conversation when the name of a competitor comes up.

“For a management team, that’s really crucial information. We can see who’s trying, and who’s failing, and who isn’t trying at all. We can then decide whom to help.”

Scaling With Data: The third and final key was simply finding out what is actually going on. “That’s been game changing,” said Swift. “We needed to find out how people are selling new products. We can now do that very quickly and we can scale it across the organization.”

Leyton can now measure the team’s ability to sell multiple services. This has risen from 1% to 25% without any formal training, simply by sharing insights from Allego Conversation Intelligence. “We said, ‘Here’s a video. This is where it comes up in conversations. This is how you have that conversation. This is how you introduce it.’

Leyton is now scaling these new capabilities across all of its customer-facing teams. “What we’re finding is, once you’ve got that ROI on your coaching, you can then start getting into the nitty gritty of everything else,” said Swift.