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Richard Brock

“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.  

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!