Hey sales leaders: You’re looking for ways to cut costs on the sales tools that aren’t delivering. Before you do, here’s an idea to squeeze more juice out of them than you thought possible.
You bought a sales tool to address a particular need — and it may or may not be yielding results on that need.
But almost all of your sales tools have the ability to provide actionable coaching insights, even if that isn’t their primary purpose/value.
You just have to have people on your enablement or ops teams who understand the data model for each of those tools, and how they can be captured in your CRM..
I’ll provide some examples of what I mean for Sales Engagement Platforms and for Conversation Intelligence.
SALES ENGAGEMENT PLATFORMS
Outreach, Salesloft, Groove, Apollo, etc — they’re primarily known as prospecting tools for SDRs. But from a coaching perspective it’s helpful to think of them as activity loggers. When configured properly, they log every email, every calendar meeting, every cold call into your CRM — even if those activities have nothing to do with with prospecting.
Thanks to this activity-logging capability, you can create reports/dashboards in your CRM related to all sorts of leading indicators:
–% of named accounts your AEs are actively engaging
–Avg # of meetings in won/lost deals
–Avg # of invitees/personas in meetings
–% of emails that get replies
–Time since someone in an active opportunity replied to an email
CONVERSATIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Gong, Chorus, Avoma and the like are known primarily for call coaching. I’d argue that an even larger value prop is the insights they can provide on specific opportunities. Rather than getting insights on things a rep is doing well or poorly in general, think about it in terms of the risk factors that can be identified for specific deals — and these are risk factors that can only be uncovered in conversations.
As long as you configure the trackers and data properly, and sync it properly into your CRM, you can uncover insights like:
–% of people on the customer’s side who actually spoke throughout a sales cycle
–% of times in a sales cycle when business value was discussed (negative consequences of current state or positive business outcomes)
–# of times different competitors are mentioned
–# of times negative sentiment is expressed
Some pro tips for both SEPs and CIs:
–All of them have native reporting in the platform; IMO you’ll find more flexibility and more valuable insights if you do the reporting in your CRM instead of in their platforms.
–If you want to get even more granular activity-level metrics, ingest their API into your CRM.
Happy selling.