ROI of sales tools

Picture this: You doubled last year’s new business revenue, ACV is up, and win rates against your biggest competitors are up.

Yet the dreaded year-end tech stack review with your CFO still has your palms sweating.

Why?

Because you know any new tech that you can’t prove an ROI for is going to go “bye bye”.

Reviewing your tech stack

SalesLoft or Outreach, yep – approved.

Your sales development reps need a tool to run their prospecting, and the coaching it provides makes an immediate impact on pipeline generation.

Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM), yep, you need a place to manage your opportunities.

DocuSign, no brainer – of course, we are keeping this.

The line item comes up for your Conversational Intelligence Tools, and you are asked if the $26,000 is worth it for a call recording tool that transcribes your calls.

How do you answer that?

Let’s first start with how you are using your conversational intelligence tools

Even call coaching software providers have been forced to admit that users are not going to log in to their products as often as they would like, so they adapted.

Revenue Intelligence became a thing, Call Intelligence platforms just became a thing, Sales Engagement Platform… Pick your fancy naming convention, doesn’t matter.

Ultimately these solutions have had to adapt, trying to pull their users’ eyeballs out of the CRM and into their products.

Take for example Deal Coaching, which according to one vendor should take place in their product, not in the CRM.

So, as a Sales Leader you now need to tell your CFO that you no longer track details of deals inside your CRM, you are doing it in your Conversational Intelligence product.

Why is there a problem

At the end of the day, reactive conversational intelligence tools are really nothing more than maybe deploying a new relic for product monitoring or Tableau as a Business Intelligence tool.

Granted, they have advanced to the point where these products can start making recommendations. Being able to take that data and then have a mechanism for deploying it is where things quickly fall through the cracks.

Even more, once that change has been communicated, how do you monitor and measure to ensure you don’t find yourself repeating the same coaching over and over again?

Chances are, as the sales leader you have invested time in building sales frameworks, playbooks, battle cards, and everything in between.

Maybe they are organized on a Wiki or in technology like Seismic or HighSpot?

The CFO disconnect

As the sales leader, how do you ensure that those mistakes don’t happen again? The mistakes that your call recording tools are capturing.

Your answer, role play, role play, and do some more role play.

Cumulatively, as a sales leader, you might spend a few hours trying to coach your rep to avoid those mistakes again in the future.

Is that a good ROI for your time

After all, a patient doesn’t pay a doctor just to tell them something is wrong, they pay a doctor because the doctor knows how to fix it.

This is where we argue it becomes nearly impossible to measure and validate the ROI of investing in reactive conversational intelligence tools.

It fails to take what is learned, and then give sales leaders and sales representatives a mechanism to immediately act on that desired behavioral change.

This is why financial leaders of companies are starting to struggle to justify the line item in their budget for this type of technology. It has become commoditized and nearly every provider is now doing transcription of calls anyway.

Connecting the dots

Now, picture this scenario as a sales leader. We’ll use Abstrakt as an example since we know the cost and return associated with our tool…. because we use it every day!

Your CFO asks you, “How are you measuring the success of your investment with Abstrakt?”

You observe that one of your competitors has just released a new product, and you immediately change the Recommended Response card.

Your team immediately sees that card the next time that competitor comes up, and just like that is an expert on this new feature that your competitor has.

Gone are the days of trying every trick in the book to get them to review competitive intel in your wiki, with Abstrakt, it appears on their screen.

This is why real-time conversational intelligence tools are the key to skipping the CFO budget review altogether.

Want to read more about the ROI? We do some fancy math in this post.