It is time for a reality check
Iris Murdoch is famous for quoting, “We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.” In sales, the illusion that reacting to challenges after they have occurred is in fact the best way to overcome future challenges is a fallacy; one that has been continually perpetuated by Conversation Intelligence Software over the past 7 years.
Now, we cannot discount the impact and important role these tools have played in laying the foundation for the next generation of technology, but it is finally time to usher out the old and welcome the new.
On G2, there are currently 59 vendors fighting for market share in the Conversational Intelligence Software space, so it’s not a question of if the market has already given the thumbs up for its acceptance of this technology, but more a question of, when will sales and revenue teams look for what’s next?
According to SEMRush, phrases like Revenue Intelligence Software, Conversational Intelligence Software, and related search terms are typed into the Google machine more than two thousand times a month.
On the other hand, Real-Time Call Coaching software doesn’t even have enough search volume to return a result which means it’s probably less than 10 a month, globally. The question then becomes, does the market not know technologies like Abstrakt exist or are they simply complacent with being reactive? The truth, as we have experienced, is somewhere in between.
Is it that hard to imagine a world where sales leaders could have access to real-time call coaching software? We have Amazon Alexa, Siri, Google… As consumers of technology, we are already recognizing the benefits of Natural Language Processing and Automated Speech Recognition; the next step is clearly for it to make its way into the Business world. The next step is to face reality. The reality is that sales leaders need to no longer be ok with the status quo.
Reality is hard, it hurts sometimes
Sign the contract, connect your calendar, connect your CRM, and boom… win rates are going to go up, right? Well, like Mike Tyson famously said in August of 1987, “Everyone has plans until they get punched in the face for the first time.” From day one, conversation intelligence software sheds light and exposes the weak spots in your revenue engine. Sales reps talking too much, sales reps interrupting prospects, sales reps not doing this, and that.
The real question that has to be asked at that point is, what are you, as the sales leader, going to do about it?
Typically, the answer is something like, “we are going to schedule call review sessions as a team” or, maybe “each sales rep will be responsible for reviewing at least three of their own calls a week and tagging me in the areas they have identified for improvement.” Sound familiar?
Twelve months later, what has changed? Maybe your sales reps are not talking as much, and maybe they are not interrupting your prospects as much but they are still doing two things that hurt your bottom line.
- Missing key qualification questions, and failing to deliver relevant customer stories
- Not handling objections correctly
So why is that? You are doing the role-playing, your reps are doing their own self-diagnosis, but yet the basics continue to be forgotten. The reason, your sales reps are human. They are imperfect, yes, even your rockstar quota crushers forget qualifying questions from time to time. The truth is, when it comes down to it, call intelligence software only works after the opportunity is lost, and does nothing to help in the moments that matter. That is where real-time call coaching software comes in, it works live, on the call when the struggle to win is happening.
Times, they are changing
Conversational intelligence software is going to look a lot different in a year from now than it does today. Revenue leaders need to begin to formalize their learnings from the past few years and prepare to leverage that data when implementing real-time call coaching software.
Competitive talk tracks, scripts, frameworks… all the components of sales calls that have been analyzed for years now need to be developed for use inside applications like Abstrakt.
Sales and revenue leaders who fail to adapt their sales coaching motions to include real-time technology will see their win percentages quickly decline as they are beaten by teams who adapt their selling motions to include real-time sales coaching software as an enablement tool.