Sales Relevance

Fixing the problems with Sales Forecasting has now become a priority for many companies.

The Work-From-Home Sales Environment highlights the need for timely and accurate Sales Forecasts. The need to have accurate insights into the sales pipeline has never been more important but has also never been more difficult.

Gartner just issued a white paper on the need for new approaches to Sales Forecasting: “Use Sales Analytics to Improve Pipeline Management and Forecasting” by Steve Rietberg. 

Here are the highlights of the changes Gartner sees as necessary:

Need to “increase sales leaders’ confidence in forecast analytics”

“… actionable metrics”

“…qualitative insights”

“…express deal progress in the CRM more consistently”

“…managers don’t receive the analytics they need to review their seller’s pipeline to effectively identify areas of risk and opportunity”

“Executive stakeholders frequently lack confidence in the pipeline data and forecast results”

A senior executive at Chorus.ai said TWICE during the call they did with ZoomInfo to announce their acquisition: “you have to be insane to count on the data in the CRM”.

Gartner reports that despite spending $156 per rep per month on CRM technology, sales leaders identified CRM/SFA effectiveness as well as pipeline management and forecasting among the top areas where sales operations are least effective. 

“Only 45% say sales leaders have high confidence in forecasting accuracy. This skepticism can result in sales leaders acting on intuition instead of evidence.”

“…inconsistent data entry”

“…inconsistent pipeline data”

 “Ensure Analytics and Forecasts are Credible to Executive Stakeholders by Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Analyses?

Salesloft just announced their new product – “Forecast”. 

 Their 18-page white paper “The Future of Sales Forecasting” has a lot of insights: “Reframing Your Approach to Take Forecasting From Dread To Deals”. 

 Here are some of the highlights from their report:

 “Your ability to understand how likely an opportunity is to close, identify risks, coach a seller through that process, and deliver an outcome (in a specific timeframe) are all attributes of the best sales leaders.”

 “The forecast as part of your sales workflow can offer AI-based insight and show changes in real-time, like a prospect’s response to an email or insight from a conversation.”

Alternative

 SalesTalk’s patent pending forecasting tool, Forecasting4U™ works during the call for AI-suggested changes to the planned presentation in response to prospect objections (or what they especially like). 

SalesTalk tracks what is being discussed with 100% accuracy because the rep is just clicking on what they are discussing with the prospect during the call. 

The rep is glad to do this simple click to record the subject of they are discussing because:

1.  The system is tracking the actual time each point is discussed just by clicking the name of the discussion point.

2.  The “Actual Time a Point is Discussed” is the best indicator of the prospect’s interest in that point.

3.  Each time the subject changes, the point just discussed is written to the Story-So-Far and the Rules engine evaluates what it knew about the prospect when the call began, what has been learned so far (from the topics discussed and the time each was discussed) to update the Forecast fields in real time, i.e., SalesTalk is real time Activity based Sales Forecasting.

4.  The Rules engine can even change the Playbook or Discussion Track that was automatically created, or AI generated at the beginning of the call. 

 What make Forecasting4U Different?

1.  Effective Sales Behavior Modeling – Utilize objective probability to identify top performer behaviors.

2.  Topic Tracking on Won Sales – Track the topics that top performers are consistently using.

3.  Accurate Data Comparison – Compare close probabilities from reps versus the AI engine for more accurate sales forecasting.

 Take the guesswork or “subjective forecasting” out of the equation and turn sales forecasting into an actionable, OBJECTIVE tool. 

Increasing Awareness of the Need to Prepare for Calls

Anthony Iannarino’s May 5 post “How to Design An Effective Sales Call Plan” has several great insights into selling today: “the time we spend with our prospects and clients is too valuable – and too rare – to not put a little thought into what we are going to do with that time.”

Anthony gives several specific suggestions including:

“What are they going to find most valuable?”

“You need to have the advice that makes you someone who can fill in the gaps in your prospective client’s knowledge and experience.”

I categorize Anthony’s advice as: initially establish and maintain your Relevance to the prospect.

Today most selling is done remotely.  This has two major impacts:

  1. Prospects will not give you much time to establish relevance.  You will get a reasonable chance to establish relevancy in face-to-face meeting, but prospects are not that courteous in phone calls – it’s too easy for the prospects to come up with reasons to stop the call if they are not initially engaged – “sorry but I have to take my dog outside”, etc.
  2. Statistics show that less than 10% of your prospects will answer their calls.  Therefore, you waste 90% of the call prep time because the prospect doesn’t answer. 

Anthony’s totally correct that you better not start a call without being prepared to be Relevant to the prospect.

We believe the solution is to use AI to prepare opening statements and Talk Tracks for every call: 

Active Intelligent Conversations (AIC) Can Guide The Conversation To Establish A Trusted Advisor Relationship By Creating:

Opening statements that reflect everything known about the prospect:

  • Demographics – title, industry, company size etc.
  • Activity – time spent on your website or videos
  • An accurate Story So Far of all previous interactions with you and others in your company

A Talk Track or Call Guide that is AI Generated    to be exactly:

  • The discussion points of interest to the prospects
  • In the sequence to maintain the prospects interest
  • To build the prospect’s recognition that you are competent
  • Professionally written messages to build their trust in you

AIC that uses the duration of the points discussed to:

  • Actively evolve the Talk Track during the call
  • Suggest “the next thing to say” based upon what is known about the prospect
  • Suggest “the next thing to say” based on what you are learning during the call
  • Dynamically rebuild the Talk Track during the call 

Active Intelligent Conversations – AIC – Will Have Your Prospects Saying, “Glad You Called!”

Measuring CI ROI at the Sales Manager Level

Being in Sales Management has always been challenging . . . and ever more so in today’s Work-From-Anywhere environment, where our “ride alongs” with reps and in-person account reviews are a thing of the past. With almost every call being virtual today, Sales Managers are turning to other methodologies – like reviewing call recordings – to accurately know what is happening in the deals they need to make their commitments. 

Effective utilization of Conversation Intelligence is helping Sales Managers overcome the obstacles of virtual management – actually making their job easier, making them more effective as coaches, and more dependable as “the sales team that always hits their quota.”

Consider the following statistics and challenges facing Sales Managers today:

  • The average Sales Manager salary in the United States is $120,030 as of September 01, 2021, but the range typically falls between $101,604 and $141,034. 
  • For an ROI calculation, let’s assume $120,000 per year in salary for working 50 weeks – 2,000 hours:  so, the Cost of the Sales Manager is $60 per hour. 
  • The average span of control for U.S. sales forces is 10-12 salespeople per manager, but there is wide variation around this average.   Let’s assume 10 salespeople per manager. 
  • If the average sales rep spends 20 hours per week talking to prospects on recorded phone calls or virtual sales presentations, the sales manager has 200 hours of recorded sales calls per week to shift through to know what is going on in the pipeline that he is responsible for managing. 

Here is how our Conversation Intelligence (CI) solution meets this challenge:

  1.  We automatically create a list of the “Interactions That Matter” for the Sales Manager to review.  Deals can be selected on any criteria:  over $X, over Y% probability to close this period, etc.  Assume that the creation of this focused criteria for review saves the Sales Manager 3 hours per week.
  2. We allow you to create a “Call Map” of all conversations of each sales rep by simply clicking on a description of the conversation subject.  Sales Managers can quickly scan our Story-So-Far to see which conversations (recorded calls or video meetings) they want to listen to (or see) based upon the criteria in step one above.  Sales Managers will select the Topics of Interest based upon the subject and the Duration of the Discussion, which willsave the Sales Manager 6 Hours Per week.
  3. Sales Managers can contextually make suggestions to the reps on how to move the Relevant Deals to close by using the Suggestions2U™ feature, which puts the suggestion(s) in the lead record, sends an email to the rep with the suggestion, and creates follow up list to discuss with the reps – automatically! Saving the Sales Manager an additional 3 hours per week. 

The ROI of the proper technology is incredible:

SalesTalk’s Conversation Intelligence solution is only $59 per rep per month, so the monthly investment for SalesTalk to support the Manager’s 10 reps is $590.  The 12 hours per month saved of the Sales Manager’s time is valued at $720 (12 hours at $60 per hour).

  • A monthly investment of $590 for the whole team SAVES $720 per month in the salary cost of the Sales Manager who would have used this time on non-revenue producing admin functions!
  • Imagine how much more revenue will be generated using Suggestions2U – and by the manager knowing which deals / conversations can be fine-tuned? Especially since they have been given an additional 12 hours per month to help close those deals!
  • How much more revenue will the reps generate with the insights the Story-So-Far gives them?

Sales Teams using SalesTalk’s patented CI solution can see up to a 500% ROI given the improved effectiveness, efficiency, and enablement we provide. Want to take a test drive and see how SalesTalk can work for your team?

Forrester’s June 8 report on Conversation Intelligence is a real eye opener! “Conversation intelligence is undergoing an AI-fueled” renaissance

A recent Forrester report on how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fueling a renaissance of Conversational Intelligence is one of the most impactful I have read in several years. To put into perspective the magnitude of the pending changes suggested in the report of how we will manage and truly COACH sellers in REAL TIME, let us look at some other recent “earthquake magnitude” changes in business practices over the past two decades:

  1. Software as a Service (SAAS) has effectively replaced Premise Deployed Software in less than 20 years. Salesforce was the first SaaS application built from scratch to achieve record growth. Founded in March 1999, much of Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff’s original marketing was focused on the then radical statement “The Death of Software” – he chose a product that was getting traction (CRM), and then brilliantly redefined the purchase criteria to be the SAAS CRM solution that he pioneered.
  • “When Amazon launched on July 16, 1995 – as a website that only sold books – founder Jeff Bezos had a vision for the company’s explosive growth and ecommerce domination”. Bezos subsequently became “The Richest Man in the World” by recognizing that the Internet was going to redefine how consumers buy products.  He started with a product that was easy to ship, not perishable, etc. – but what is not sold on Amazon today?
  •  Home Depot gave an “isle of similar tools to choose from” to overcome the few choices offered in traditional hardware stores. The rest is history.
  • Costco doesn’t even attempt to have everything you might want – it just selects the “fast movers” they can sell for less because of their volume purchases.  They are so dynamic in their merchandise choices that they don’t even label their aisles – they just give them numbers.

THE BIGGEST CHANGE IN SELLING, WAS ACCELERATED BY THE COVID FORCED WORK FROM HOME ENVIRONMENT, AND WILL IMPACT SALES MANAGEMENT AND SALES COACHING THE WAY THE AUTOMOBILE IMPACTED THE HORSE AND BUGGY INDUSTRY.

The June 8, 2021Report from Forrester gives overwhelming facts that this new day of selling is here!  Let’s look at the facts in this report:

  • The demand for these new AI driven Conversation Intelligence tools is driven by “the ever-increasing importance (and cost) of customer conversations” – when only 5% of the people you call (a realistic average of B2B outbound lead calls in 2021) answer their phones, a live conversation is too precious to waste. 
  • Forrester defines Conversation Intelligence as: “Solutions for extracting actionable insights from spoken conversations with customers (e.g., phone calls, videoconferencing interactions, or other recorded conversations) for business purposes”.

Example: the screen shots below show how SalesTalk creates a Call Map to Recorded Calls, noting the actual time within the recorded call that a key point is discussed for easy listening to just the important parts of recorded calls:

  • “To help you monitor and prompt agents and managers on what to say, what action to take, or what to coach an agent on.”
  • . . . upskill sales teams to give the best proof points at the right time, more eloquently, offer customer context, and help the company and sales staff track repeated interactions.”

SalesTalk’s What2Say™ feature uniquely addresses this issue by providing sellers with a personalized TalkTrak™ designed specifically for each prospect based on their digital persona, beginning with an AI generated Opening Statement. As more is learned about the prospect, the TalkTrak evolves to ensure the conversation remains relevant to them.

Example:  AI Generated Opening Statements Establish Relevancy. 

Art Sobczak of Smart Calling makes a compelling case for a “personalized, customized, therefore relevant” opening statement in his podcast number 177 – “A Recording of a Cringeworthy Cold Art Received: 

https://theartofsales.com/177-a-recording-of-a-cringeworthy-cold-call-art-received/

Below is an example of an AI Generated Opening Statement:

  • “Agent optimization and coaching vendors provide real-time agent guidance. Traditionally, vendors helped brands improve quality by analyzing conversations that had already happened. The new breed of agent optimization vendors focuses on real-time analysis of in-process conversations. They then offer agents behavioral cues, dialogue suggestions, and proposed content (knowledge articles, forms, media, etc.) that can help the agent provide a compelling service experience”.

Isn’t guidance during a call a better alternative to selectively listening to recorded calls – and using AI to handle the objection during the call so the rep can “save the deal” – rather than learning how they might do better next time when you “autopsy” the deal you just lost?

Anthony Iannarino humorously makes the point about the need to be Relevant to the prospect’s perceived needs:

“Without insights, you cannot create the value necessary to develop and win deals. There is zero value creation for a client by you qualifying them, nor is there any real value created by asking your client to describe their “hot button,” their “pain point,” or “what’s keeping them up at night.” You have never had a client thank you for confirming they are the authority and have a budget. Nor have you heard a client utter the words, “Thank you for asking us the same questions about our problems as the last seven salespeople who sat in that chair.”

The contest is no longer around the company, their capabilities, or their solutions as much as it about who creates the most significant value throughout the sales conversation. The dominance of value creation has always been true at some level and has now the critical factor in creating and winning deals.

No insights, no value creation. No value creation, no deal.” – Anthony Iannarino – June 13, 2021

EASY AND TIGHT INTEGRATION WITH THE CRM:

  • “vendors integrate with your existing systems to add a new layer of conversation intelligence with more advanced, specialized, easier-to-use, and/or cheaper capabilities.”

If something has to be written down, it will not be comprehensive, maybe not even correct. Can you afford for your reps to spend too much time trying to enter what they remember was discussed during the call?  Isn’t it better to have the system automatically create a comprehensive Story-So-Far of everything that was sent to, said to, or said by the prospect – with the actual time each point is discussed?  Isn’t the actual time a subject is discussed the best indicator of what is important to the prospect? 

Sports and Selling . . . As others have said, “so alike and yet so very different”.

In Tennis, points are scored on every serve and the game mainly relies on the skill and technique of the players.

In Football, the strategy matters greatly, and points are scored during the game. In fact, you have someone guiding the strategy during the game – the quarterback. The quarterback is assisted by his coach when he wants to take a time out to get advice from someone who’s even more experienced. But the quarterback is calling the plays.

In Curling, execution skills are table stakes!  Strategy is the key to winning.   No points are scored until after the last shot is made.  To a certain extent, a “Curling match” is more like a “sales match” where the seller tries to overcome the buyer’s objections because in both cases it doesn’t matter until the order is signed or the last shot is played. All the efforts don’t matter – the “score is not calculated until the match is over!

There is another huge difference between selling and sports: On “game day” 99% of the sports teams show up . . .  in sales only 5% of the prospects answer your call. What are the ramifications of this in sales? It’s critical that you’re Relevant to the prospect. That means you’re competent, and you are talking about what the prospect is interested in.

We try to coach our new sales reps to say the right thing, at the right time, but preparing them for each call is different. Each prospect is different. You need to reflect the unique attributes of the prospect.  For example, is your prospect a market leader or with a market challenger? Are you talking to the CFO or a CEO? In both instances your approach needs to be different in order for them to stay on the phone with you and even give you a shot at closing the sale.   

Another big difference between sports and sales is you may only play one game a week . . . in sales, you may make several hundred calls a week. If only 5% of the people are going to answer their phone, how can you be adequately prepared? The first call needs to be tailored to the specifics of the prospect and to the experience level of the sales rep, so they come across as credible. If you’ve been in NFL for 20 years, you know what you might want to do in any given situation. But if you just graduated from college and you’re in your first year of the NFL, you may need some guidance on what a good plan for this game would be today. Looking at all the previous games that this competitor has played, how are you going to beat them today? So, you have a strategy and the strategy changes on the field, as it should, but you don’t have it written down. You’re going to try to go on memory. You have a plan, but in today’s sales calls, you don’t have that luxury.

We can use artificial intelligence so that the sales rep is given an opening statement that is appropriate to his experience and appropriate to the prospect. For example, it’s critical that a beginning sales rep not talk about things that go beyond their experience because they lose all credibility. An experienced sales rep can say, “In my 10 years in Sales, I’ve watched AI go from something that was interesting to something that’s really pivotal and key to being effective in every sales call.” However, a younger sales rep who just started working with their company would have to say, “My company has been in AI for 10 years and we have four patents pending.” A beginning sales rep can brag about their company – an experienced person can speak to their personal experience.  This is important because there’s usually a huge disparity gap in experience between the sellers and the buyers . . . because the buyers have money (control the purchase budget), which means they usually have more experience than the sellers, at least those in the Business Development role making the first calls.

What happens when you have 100 or 300 calls you must prepare for weekly? You’re going to forget what you prepared for, because the person you really want to talk to didn’t answer your calls. You find that you have forgotten all you prepared to discuss. So, to be effective, a seller needs a system to generate a call plan of what would be the right things to talk about to this prospect, not generically, but reflecting the experience level of the sales rep because you don’t bring things up that are beyond their experience to handle.

 That’s why it’s so critical to have a call plan, which is your steady talk track of what you plan to discuss. It’s helpful whether you’re experienced or inexperienced. It guides you on what will probably be the flow of the call, and helps you get back on track if the flow goes in an unexpected direction.

What we’ve done using artificial intelligence is comparable to what a good senior sales rep would do, based upon the flow of the call. It provides you with the ability to immediately pivot if your current solution or conversation is not a fit. The focus needs to immediately change, and that is where the artificial intelligence comes into play. Our Talk Tracks are based upon what has been discussed, the amount of time a subject was discussed, the number of times a subject was discussed, the experience of the sales rep, and the answers that you’re being given to the questions that you ask – everything from the day you first got the lead to what the story so far to this moment in time – is reflected in the talk track.

The ability to dynamically change during the call based upon what been learned is critical to a successful engagement. A successful sale is determined much like a curling match – are you going to get the score or not based on the strategy you used? In curling, it’s the final rock of the final play that determines who wins the game. And it works much the same way in sales.