Sales Relevance

“SALES RELEVANCE” – the newest category of Sales Enablement

The recent Unicorn success of Balto.ai is drawing attention to a new category in Sales Enablement Tools –Sales Relevance – which has far greater benefits for sellers than any other Sales Tool.  Let’s review the current Sales Enablement Categories and the benefits they offer so we can see how important this new category is going to be.

CRM – CRM was created when it became practical to give sales reps access to computer databases to log the information from their sales calls instead of in their “3 ring binder”.  The focus of CRM quickly morphed into a forecast tool that the CEO would use to confidently provide the basis of quarterly and annual forecasts to his Board of Directors. Most Boards, especially those of a public company, place an enormous amount of emphasis on “meeting the forecast”. 

In fairness, the Board is guiding budget and hiring decisions based upon the forecast – and public company investors place the highest premium on the dependability of meeting projected earnings.  In the Salesforce movie “The History of Sales”, highly respected Sales Consultant, Neil Rackham, said that CRM was a job insurance policy for the CEO . . .he said that “CRM was done to reps, not for reps”. 

When CRM systems first became available, sellers were still “the brokers of information” – prospects had to go through them and give accurate contact info to get information on the company and its products.  Now, prospects get all the product info (on both you and your competitors) on the internet.  In fact, many prospects prefer to never talk to a sales rep. 

So, the role of CRM has evolved into “Recording What Happened” instead of “Making Things Happen” (as the next Sales Enablement tools do for us).  The leading Sales Relevance systems automatically update the CRM, and the Best Sales Relevance systems create a totally accurate “Story-So-Far” of everything that has been sent to, read by, said to, or said by the prospect. 

The Story-So-Far, which can now be linked right into the prospect record in the CRM, can even show the actual duration of every discussion point that was relevant to the prospect. This capability is critical, because the actual time a point is discussed is usually the best indicator of what is most Relevant to the prospect.

Call Recording – gives Sales Leaders an opportunity to hear conversations the sellers are having so they can coach them effectively . . . and know what is happening in the territory.  While Call Recording has an important role to play, it is now generally recognized that it takes too much time to select and then listen to the calls that might matter.  Even the CEO of a leading Call Recording application admonished his customers that they should spend more time listening to calls for the application to be effective.  Call Recording is like a gym membership – simply joining a gym does not get you in shape, and few are willing to put in the time using Call Recording to get the perceived benefits.

There is one thing you can’t get without listening to recorded calls: voice intonation.  However, how many calls per seller per week does a Sales Leader need to listen to coach his reps on the proper intonation? 

Another often sited benefit of listening to recorded calls is to measure the percentage of time the rep is speaking versus the prospect.  Does the seller “show up and throw up”, or do they engage the prospect by asking questions that will lead the prospect to “discover for themselves” that they need your product? 

We link into our Sales Relevance system transcribed calls that clearly show who is talking the most.  The transcription product we integrate with is especially valuable when are transcribing Zoom or recorded video calls. (and aren’t most sales calls now Zoom Calls?)  The sellers get three different sensory stimulations:  listening to the words being said, watching the cursor move through the transcribed words as they listen to the voice recording, and looking at the prospect’s face for their reaction as key points are discussed.   

The “SECRET SAUCE” TO MAKING CALL RECORDING INVALUABLE, is to direct the Sales Leader to ONLY THE KEY MINUTES FROM ALL THE RECORDED HOURS THAT WARRANT THEIR TIME.  If the Sales Relevance system tracks the duration of each discussion point, then it can create a “Call Map” of all the recorded calls so that the Sales Leader can simply drag their cursor to the important discussions in the recorded calls that are linked in the comprehensive Story-So-Far.

More importantly, Sales Relevance system can create lists of the calls that warrant the manager’s attention.  For example, calls where: the deal is forecasted to close this month…  for over $YYY…and the purchase is budgeted.  WOULDN’T THE SALES MANAGER WANT TO LISTEN TO THE DISCUSSION OF THE DECISION CRITERIA IN THESE SELECTED CALLS?  

 The Call Whisper feature was introduced with the promise that it would allow the sales managers to give guidance during the call, i.e. when the timely guidance could help close sales.  But Whisper is too disruptive, so it has few users.  Modern Sales Relevance systems allow the manager to just click a button to send suggestions via SMS or Chat to their reps during the calls if they are monitoring the calls – an effective way of Coaching4UÔ.

Sales Cadence – creates a discipline for the often-undisciplined Business Development Reps.  Cadence is critical to maximizing the sales opportunities from your marketing dollars – multimode touches (calls, emails, text messages sent regularly so your company is in front of the prospect) creates a persistence which will get the appointment, but not close the sale.

The adoption of Sales Cadence systems has been phenomenal over the last several years.  The market leaders in this category are true Software as a Service (SaaS) “Unicorns”.   And you see that the market leaders are rapidly becoming the CRM for their customers.  However, Sales Cadence systems are primarily “Sales Efficiency” systems – and while critical to leverage your revenues from your leads – they can be made dramatically more valuable when they are leveraged by integrating with a Sales Relevance system – a Sales Effectiveness system that makes sure every interaction is an “Interaction That Matters”. 

Sales Relevance – the goal of Sales Relevance solutions (like Balto.ai and SalesRelevance.com) is to make the sales reps more effective on every call – being effective closes business! 

Successful Sales Relevance Applications:

  • Must be a seamless plugin to your current Sales Technology stack.  
  • Must go beyond AI voice recognition to know what to say . . . and when to say it.
  • Allow the rep to simply click on the subject to get an accurate record of what is being discussed. 

Speech recognition does not always give the Relevant answer. How many ways are there to say “Budget” and not relate to the “budget to buy my product”?  For example: “Work From Home (WFH) has really benefitted my personal budget – by the auto gas savings”, “My $12 lunch budget is no longer needed because I just eat the leftovers from dinner”, “I save on my laundry budget because no one can tell if my shirt is pressed on a Zoom call”, etc.

By clicking the subject being discussed, the system tracks the actual time subjects are being discussed.  This helps in training, but more importantly, it allows the AI to select the next best thing to say based upon what is unambiguously Relevant to the prospect.

Sales Relevance systems with AI allow you to “Pick Up Where You Left Off” on the next call by using AI to generate an opening statement that reflects everything in the Story-So-Far or your “augmented” prospect lead records.

We augment our prospect information with ZoomInfo data.  This allows us to always be 100% relevant in our customer calls.   We not only use this information to initially establish Relevancy, but this prospect specific data – when combined with the evolving Story-So-Far -drives the AI engine as it rebuilds our Talk Tracks during the calls to maintain our Relevancy to the prospect during the call.  

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!

The Sales Manager’s Relevance Lens to Recorded Calls . . .

The Who, Why, and How of selecting key conversations and the Relevant parts of each to listen to.

The Math Problem:  if the average sales manager has 8 direct reports and the average rep records 25 hours of conversations per week, the manager is looking at 200 hours of recorded phone calls – per week.  Today, mangers often listen to sample calls blindly. On average, less than 1% of recorded calls are reviewed by Sales Managers because they don’t find it to be a productive use of their time.

Why?

Because they don’t have a Relevance Lens to focus their listening.  

Typically, Sales Managers focus just on calls about deals that are forecasted to close – which gives them good “peace of mind”. But what about all the other deals?

Sales Managers can make a bigger impact on revenues if they ONLY LISTEN TO: 

Selected minutes of calls that are qualified to close but not forecasted (based upon the info in the CRM), and

Where the Sales Manager can positively influence the outcome

Here’s the solution to the proposed math problem:

CRM reports will list the potential upside deals to monitor.

SalesTalk’s Interaction Insights will give Managers a concise overview of all calls pertaining to those opportunities, including: all instances of recorded calls, the number of times key topics were discussed, the last time a deal topic (Talking Point) was discussed, and the total time spent on each topic – for every call. 

The Story-So-Far gives the Sales Manager a clear, simple, and comprehensive view of everything that has been sent to, read by, said to, or said by the prospect.  The Story-So-Far is really a visual Call Map of recorded calls, allowing Managers to quickly see and focus on just the parts of the call that are most important to them. 

Sales Managers can simply click on the link to the recorded call shown in the Story-So-Far to start listening to the call – and use the “Begins” Time of each topic to go straight to the parts of recorded call that matter.

After listening to the key parts of the call, Sales Managers can quickly and easily make suggestions to their Sales Reps by simply clicking on the MundayMorning™ Deal Review. All suggestions and notes given by the Manager appear right in the Story-So-Far for immediate follow up by the Rep. 

Let us show you how SalesTalk can fully leverage your current technology stack to drive incremental revenue for your sales team.

The Epic Battle of Man Versus “their Machine”

Using the AI in “your Machine” to create the Relevance Advantage . . .

Much has been written about how the Internet has replaced the Sales Rep as the broker of information . . . that the buyer is 70% through their “buyer’s journey” before they will speak with anyone.

Before they will take the first call, the prospect has “worn out” Google (“their Machine”) finding all the products that might solve their problem.  Reps should assume that the prospect knows the competing products better than you do but if they take your call, then your company made the cut.

All true . . .

Since on average only one in eight prospects will answer your phone call, reps can’t prepare as they would if they knew they would be speaking to the prospect. So how can sales reps be sure they monetize the few and precious opportunities to talk to a prospect, especially not knowing which one on their call list will answer?

SalesTalk’s AI Generated TalkTraks™ uses the AI in “your Machine” (everything known about the prospect from your CRM and other data sources like ZoomInfo) to create and maintain a RELEVANT conversation with the prospect throughout the dialogue.

SalesTalk’s What2Say™ will generate a personalized Opening Statement based on prospect persona as well as a dynamic Call Guide of what should be discussed next:

  • In the sequence you should discuss relevant points
  • Based upon what is learned from the prospect.

Our Story-So-Far chronicles every interaction with a prospect, tracking the actual time and sequence that the prospect spent discussing different topics on the call, as well as the time spent looking at your videos or emails sent. 

Isn’t the actual time a prospect spent discussing a topic the best measure of their interest? Isn’t time spent the ultimate measure of Relevance?    I think most would agree that the only way to keep a prospect on the phone, is to stay relevant to their needs and engage their interest.

Can you see how using the AI in “your Machine” creates the Relevance Advantage over the Google research your prospect has done before they take your call?

How Do You Validate Your Sales Reps’ Effectiveness?

Reps must be effective in each and every interaction with a prospect in order to avoid elimination as a potential vendor.  Remember – your sales reps serve as a proxy for how buyers perceive your organization’s ability to meet their needs.  And if the reps are unable to succinctly address questions or communicate the value of your solution in a way that resonates with the prospect, unfortunately so goes the prospect’s perception of your offering.  Can your business afford to have anything but the best representation of your products or services?

To be effective, reps must be able to engage knowledgeably, professionally and confidently in each stage of the buyer’s journey.  Each sales rep has to know exactly where in the journey the buyer is and has been, who that buyer is, what that buyer’s “hot buttons” are, why your product is the best solution for that buyer, and how your product compares to the competitors.

In summary, effectiveness =

KNOWLEDGE – of the product line and competitors; able to answer all product questions and objections

RELEVANCE –   focus on the issues that are of interest to each individual prospect; continue, without repeating, earlier conversations held with that prospect

CONFIDENCE – through knowledge and relevance, establish confidence in sales rep, in the solution, in the seller to the prospect