Richard Brock

The Evolution of Sales Enablement Technologies

I have been in the Sales Enablement space since the beginning – CRM Magazine even called me the “Father of CRM” and Brock Control Systems was the first CRM company to go public. I share this background with you so you can appreciate my glowing recommendation of this new report from Forrester:

 The Forrester Tech Tide: Sales Technologies – Q1 2021 – 15 Technologies That Underpin Sales

By Mary Shea, PhD

February 16, 2020

 I have quoted some of the points that especially resonated with me in my comments below. Forrester has an incredibly unique insight into to the entire suite of products that are helping sales teams adapt to the New Normal in Sales. Mary Shea does a great job of explaining the technologies that have the “ability to help B2B selling organizations respond to buyer behavioral trends, many of which COVID-19 has dramatically accelerated”.

 This report really validates the five patent pending features we have developed at SalesTalk over the last few years. For example, Forrester recommends investments in:

 1.      Conversation Intelligence – (our TalkTagging Call Maps feature) “In a business environment where sales coaching must take place remotely, it’s no surprise that conversation intelligence is a sought-after tool”.

2.     Revenue Intelligence – (our Interaction Insights Management tool) “All Eyes Focus On Revenue Intelligence – Sales leaders better understand the potential paybacks from investments in automatic data write-back and insights derived from buyer and seller activity data”.

3.     Sales Engagement – (our AI powered What2Say Planned Dialogue generator) “As automatic data capture and CRM upload of buyer and seller activity data become commonplace, AI-generated insights from a range of revenue-cycle activities offer significant potential.”

4.     Sales Training and Services – (our UseFul2Me and 2KnowWho Feedback and Intent Visibility features) “In difficult economic environments, Sales Training and Services are often some of the first budget items to be cut. But with B2B buying and selling primarily taking place remotely and in digital formats, sales leaders must invest in helping their sellers and extended revenue team members gain the new skills they need to adapt and the Fifty-eight percent of user survey respondents say their organization received high or extremely high returns on their Sales Training and Services investment but expect higher returns with providers that have tuned their offerings to help sellers tailor their engagement strategies to resonate in a remote but connected world.”

5.     Sales content (our Know-It-All-Navigator and Say2SellSales Content offerings) “Sales Content solutions help sellers’ access, personalize, and share content efficiently and effectively with buyers across the lifecycle. With rich analytics, dynamic content, comprehensive workflow, and real-time guidance, these solutions increase marketing and sales collaboration and enable better buyer experiences”.

 Prediction for the 2022 Report – Two new product categories will be added: 

1.  AI Assisted Call Preparation (like our What2Say Planned Dialogue Generator)

2.  AI Assisted Call Follow Up (like What2Send Communication Follow Up Generator). 

 A few years ago, the market exploded with the demand for Cadence products which created an efficient, disciplined, and measurable tool for the sales process. I predict that Pre-Call and Post-Call tools that enable sales reps to immediately establish and maintain their Relevancy to the prospects are going to grow even faster. Products like What2Say and What2Send allow the reps to demonstrate Competence and Confidence in all prospect interactions and give reps a clear and competitive advantage over reps who are still just “winging it”.  

What If You Never Had to Update Your CRM Again?

Would you walk home from the store carrying all your groceries when a digital Uber is offering you a free ride?

I founded the first CRM company (CRM Magazine honored me as the “Father of CRM”), so I can speak about ‘My Baby” with a sense of perspective. “Dad” says: it’s time for CRM to quit demanding so much time – reps need to get on to their next call! 

Many Sales Reps see CRM as something that is done “to” them, not “for” them. As a result, the information entered in the CRM is usually vague, incomplete, and not always current.

But now there is an easy way for the CRM to get automatically updated – even during a sales call – and always be 100% accurate

. . . a way to update all key metrics like Deal Status, Probability to Close, Next Steps, and even Send “look at this deal” notes to the Sales Managers automatically.

Our Talk Traks™ are AI generated for each sales call to guide the rep on what should be covered during the call. The Talk Traks include not only suggested Talking Points based on each prospect’s unique persona, but also single click annotations that capture all the data needed in the CRM – as they happen. This allows the rep to focus on the conversation with the prospect, not taking notes for data input. Most importantly, everything captured during the call is automatically updated in the CRM, saving valuable selling time for each rep.

How valuable would it be for your sellers to save 90% of the time they currently spend updating their CRM – while giving you more accurate data at your fingertips?

Leveraging Your Call Recording with Call Mapping

Recognizing the limitations of their CRM, many companies have adopted Call Recording to give them critical insights into what is happening in their sales calls.  But is that the complete answer?  Consider these proposed questions below. While listening to call recordings will give you SOME insight, does it solve all these problems? Is there a better solution?

Do your sales reps always come across as professional and confident, creating trust between the sales rep and the prospect?

Do your reps just “show up and throw up”, spewing product features until they bore the prospects to death?

Isn’t the actual time a subject is discussed the ultimate measure of the importance of that subject to the prospect?

These are common pain points that are felt across most, if not all industries that have adopted Call Recording. But there is a solution – SalesTalk.

Playbooks

SalesTalk quickly and easily loads all your current content into our system to create relevant Playbooks that your reps can use to guide them through their sales calls. No longer will they have to search through battle cards, documents, or binders to help them say the next best thing – they will have customizable content that can be followed word for word or simply referred to as a guide to move their prospect down the sales funnel.

Since the content is easily loadable and customizable, you will be able to capture and quickly share Best Practices to your team such as adding rebuttals to common objections. Your reps will easily see that new content has been added to their Playbooks, letting them know you’ve made an update.

Providing your Sales Reps with real-time best things to say in response to any objection means two things: First, your reps will be more Confident in their answer, which will build trust with the prospect. Second, the rep’s answer will be the accurate “best answer” for any given question or objection.

Story-So-Far

The Story-So-Far is a true Call Map that makes looking at your recorded calls so much easier – and so much more effective. It is a comprehensive look into everything that has been sent to, read by, said to, or said by the prospect.

Perhaps most importantly, it shows the amount of time (Duration) a given subject was discussed – which is the best indicator of what’s most important to the prospect.

As a Sales Manager, isn’t it invaluable to be able to see that your reps are following the recommended best practices? Would a Story So Far allow you to see the actual best practices that are resulting in sales? By comparing the sales efforts of your most successful reps to others, you will quickly see patterns that are not obvious to even to the sales Rep who is being so successful.

You see subconscious patterns of communications that work.  “They work” is measured by sales that close, which is why the Rep you’re listening to is more successful than their peers. Having this comprehensive Story So Far showing the best practices of the reps who are earning the most commissions will make it easier for peer reviews; the reps who are not as successful recognize that they too can become better by just replicating the behavior of the most successful reps. This Call Map makes it quite easy for you as the Sales Manager to extract the relevant parts of key conversations where the best reps are doing things in the best way, allowing you to share those best practices with the whole team.

Interaction Insights

Can Call recording generate a Report of the interactions like you see in this Interaction Summary? Notice that the report shows the number of times a point was discussed, the last time a subject was discussed, and the total time this subject was discussed. Perhaps most importantly, there’s no ambiguity about the subject that was discussed. The report is generated by the simple click of a keystroke by your Sales Rep, which indicates to the system that they are changing the subject with the customer.

You won’t recognize your Old CRM in a Year!

CRM’s evolution of Conversation Intelligence will be as game changing to SAAS was to Premise Deployed Software.

Conversation Intelligence will do to CRM what Grub Hub did to grocery stores – who wants to shop for the food, clean it, cook, and then clean the dishes when you can just order what you want, and have it delivered to your front door?

The CRM industry has a long and interesting history. I know; I founded the first CRM company to go public (Brock Control Systems) in 1984 and have been in the industry ever since. Some of the major paradigm shifts we have seen over the past decades include:

Marc Benioff built the wildly successful Salesforce.com by redefining how software was implemented. In a very gutsy move, he defined his competitive advantage as a simpler, quicker, and less expensive way to implement a core business tool – CRM. He was so successful in leading this change in software implementation that all his competitors had to play catch up to offer SaaS solutions after he had locked down the leadership position in CRM by competing on ease of implementation rather than more features.

Based upon Tom Siebel’s positioning, CRM is a tool for CEOs to impress their Boards with the accuracy of their forecasts. CRMs were purchased by CEO’s and VPs of Sales as a back-office tool, getting to the point where – as one senior sales manager told me – “my CRM has more dashboards than NASCAR”.

Neil Rackham (author of the SPIN Selling methodology) offered an insightful analysis of why CRM was initially “done to sales reps” – not “done for sales reps” in the interesting movie that was produced by Salesforce.com (and is still hosted on the Salesforce.com website) – The History of Sales.

All of these events directly contributed to the evolution of CRM. Several recent events will cause dramatic changes that will render your current CRM unrecognizable.  The new generation of CRM will save Seller’s time and make them more effective. Most importantly, Sellers will willingly embrace the “new CRM” as something being done for them. Here are a few of the events that are causing those changes:

The Work from Home (WFH) environment has sales managers scrambling to find a way to get visibility into what is happening in their sales opportunities.
Those reps returning from WFH to the office on a staggered basis will present additional management and measurement challenges.

Sales Leaders finally recognize that sales reps will never take the time to manually update their CRM accurately and comprehensively after every call – even if their memory was good enough to remember all the key points discussed during them. Sunday night batch updating of contact records will never be as accurate as those done during the call.

Call Recording was the hope of capturing what was happening in the sales calls.  But it is now obvious that Sales Managers don’t have the time to listen to the 160 hours per week of recorded calls that their direct reports are making (8 direct reports recording 20 hours of calls per week).  I was surprised to read the CEO of a major call recording company openly admonish his customers that they are not listening to enough recorded calls. 

On the positive side, there are two Sales Metrics that Call Recording uniquely provides:

The percentage of time your rep speaks versus the prospect.

The voice intonation of your reps(are they confident / competent). 

These metrics only require infrequent sampling of recorded calls (at most only a few calls selected weekly or even monthly) to give the Sales Managers the insights they need to coach their reps on these metrics.

The Challenges of Call Recording

Call Recordings track the duration of time your rep and the buyer speak before “yielding the floor”.   However, they don’t (and can’t) record the actual time a key subject is discussed.  Isn’t the amount of time a key subject is discussed the most important metric of what is important to the prospect?

Call Recording attempts to give you a measure of the key topics discussed by supporting “key word” searches.  However, is there only one word to describe a key concept?  This Context Confusion (the use of many words to describe the same feature) and voice recognition (accents, slang terms, etc.) prevent accurate summaries of the key points of interest to the prospects. 

The Next “Best Thing” for Conversation Intelligence – Call Transcription

Call Transcription is now being touted as the solution in lieu of having to listen to recorded calls and is the cornerstone of many software vendor’s Conversation Intelligence solution. However, this methodology has many challenges with it as well.

The Challenges with Call Transcription

Call Transcriptions suffer from the same Concept Confusion and language/enunciation errors that users face when the same AI technology applied to Recorded Calls is used to transcribe the calls. Have you ever compared the automatically generated transcript to the actual recording, only to discover that many key words are mis-transcribed? What do those errors say about the accuracy of your keyword search results?

If you do a Google search, you will see the average person speaks 150 works per minute.  If your average sales call is 20 minutes, each call with will be at least 6 pages of single-spaced typing (average is 500 words per page).  Will a busy Sales Manager take the time to read the 6 pages of the transcribed call looking for important discussion points –  for every 20-minute call?

What Should CRM’s Look Like Next Year?

These challenges above are sure to be felt across all industries to varying degrees as we continue to evolve into our new normal. As a result, I believe these features will need to be table stakes to meet the expectations and requirements for sellers moving forward:

In lieu of Call Recording or Call Transcription as clunky tools for Sales Leaders to use for coaching, a clear Interaction Insight Report should be available that tracks individual calls with roll up at the rep level.  One that shows how consistently the reps are following the Recommended Best Practices for what should be discussed and for how long they will be discussed tailored to each deal?    

CRM’s must include an Interaction Chronicle (a comprehensive Story So Far) that tracks every interaction with a prospect – and the time spent on each key topic – visible to the entire sales team so that any team member can easily pick up where they left off with the prospect.

Ideally, CRMs should include AI functionality to not only automate the usual, mundane chores of contact record updating, but also provide dynamic AI tools which allow sellers to have Relevant Dialogues with every prospect, based on individual personas, i.e., every call will be personalized to the prospects know that your team can meet (or exceed) their requirements for any solution you are offering – your reps will always be perceived as Competent and Relevant!

My Vision of CRM

CRM was originally started in order to share notes about what was happening in Sales Calls.  The deployment of minicomputers and then the adoption of personal computers gave the sales reps an inexpensive tool to keep their notes of what was happening on their deals.

This early vision of a “Customer” “Relationship” “Management” system was highjacked into a system that was done “for the sales managers and CEO’s” to help them keep their jobs by consistently delivering on their forecasted revenues. This focus on “making my forecast” meant deals exceeding what was needed to make this quarter’s forecast were often held over to the next quarter to assure that next number’s forecast was made.  It is no secret that Wall Street values dependability even more importantly than maximizing results over several quarters through unsteady sales growth quarter over quarter. 

A sales manager in a big company described to me what he referred to as the “Sunday Night Funnies”, where “the sales reps were frantically updating the CRM on Sunday night with what they remember from their calls and what they want management to know about their pipeline in preparation for their Monday Morning Deal Review.’

Here we are all these years later and reps still struggle with the same problems, but we have added even more difficulty to the situation because of the displacement of the office environment. This shift has turned traditional sales models on their heads, leading to the following changes:

The Internet displaced the sales rep as the broker of information on a company’s product.  Most studies say the buyer is 70% through their purchase process (now called the Buyer’s Journey) before they will even talk to a sales rep.

The prospects have probably looked at your competitors before they take your first call . . . there is no such thing as a “quiet deal” anymore. They expect you to be more knowledgeable than they are.

The new “educated prospect” has turned traditional discovery on its head!  “Can I have 15 minutes to understand your needs” is no longer a good opening statement.  Your opening statement needs to be highly personalized to address how your product will specifically benefit this prospect. Most reps will need AI to pull together “the right thing to say” in an opening statement.

Because less than 20% of the people called will answer the rep’s calls, the reps need AI to do the research to create personalized opening statements Reps don’t have the time to do the research required when only 20% of their calls will be answered. 

Reps will love having Agent Assisted dialing to increase the actual discussions they have per day.  And the blended cost of connected calls will be considerably less using the combination of outsourced Agent Assisted Dialing and the BDR Salary. 

Virtual Calls are substantially shorter than traditional face to face meetings used to be, so there is now little time for rapport building.  The prospect’s confidence and trust are now built on the rep’s effectiveness in showing a fit to the prospect’s needs.

So, what is the answer? I believe we will start to see an industry shift to the following solutions:

Access to a Google-like searchable knowledge repositories of product and competitive information will replace the flood of internal emails that are being sent to the sales team now to keep informed of new features and the key changes to existing products.  Until the data is searchable with a Google-like search, the info is of extremely limited value to the entire sales team – because email is not such a great “knowledge repository for reps to have info at their fingertips” to handle prospect questions and objections.

Real time alerts when prospects look at videos, proposals, etc. will allow reps to follow up on prospect activity quickly and easily when the prospect is thinking about your product.

Your cell phone will become the window to a complete Story-So-Far as your real time follow up when prospects show interest, rather than waiting until you are back at your desk.

Coaching will be more effective – and better received by the reps you are coaching – because you will be showing them the actual processes being followed by the reps who are the leading producers. Comparing what top reps d0 compared to another is the best way to demonstrate Best Practices that really work!  Reps like comparisons to their peers rather than hearing sales managers telling them “when I was a rep, I used to . . .”. 

A virtual Call Map (the Story-So-Far), which shows where important (by keyword) and meaningful (by duration of the discussion) topics were discussed will make listening to just the important parts of important calls easy, efficient, and productive.

Traditional Playbooks will be replaced by AI generated TalkTraks or PlannedDialogues.   Playbooks by definition have too much irrelevant information in them because they must include “what to say” to any question or objection, rather than AI TalkTraks that are generated specifically for each call to this prospect.  The discussion points – and their suggested sequence – is personalized even down to the different personality type of the prospect. 

These AI “PlannedDialogues” will evolve during the call based upon the subject discussed and the duration points are discussed.  AI initially establishes and then maintains the reps Relevance to the prospect based upon the discussion. 

AI generated follow up emails are going to dramatically improve the effectiveness of sales calls because the AI engine will draft an email that is: far better than a new BDR would know how to write, more detailed than an experienced rep would take the time to write, and in the best sequence to elicit the desired next action.

We all know that change is painful, so I do not expect to see this happen overnight. However, as companies continue to move forward, they will need to find the right solution for their pain points, which I have more than likely outlined here. A solution that can bring an end to unnecessary problems by making their CRM work FOR them not AGAINST them.