What is Conversation Analytics?

Conversation analytics is the detailed examination and evaluation of live or recorded phone conversations between two or more people. It uses technology to capture the conversation and generate reports on the structure, words used, emotions, and outcomes.

Conversation analytics software is typically comprised of multiple components. First, it captures dialogue via call recording, then uses speech-to-text technology to deliver transcriptions of these calls. A combination of text analysis, AI, and machine learning help to give granular insight into the conversation, such as sentiment, conversational patterns, interactions, and so on.

Sales teams today leverage the insights gained from conversation analytics to coach reps and improve their performance so they can ultimately close more deals and generate increased revenue at rapid pace.

Sales Teams Need to Focus on Quality, Not Just Quantity

Sales teams have to look beyond performance efficiency and focus on the effectiveness of their activities, particularly around conversations with prospects. Many teams measure efficiency metrics like:

• Calls to connections ratio
• Call to opportunity ratio
• Number of callbacks
• Response time
• Answer rates

These metrics are incredibly powerful for making reps more efficient. That being said, they only improve a rep’s performance to a certain extent. Once the phone call connects, teams lose visibility. Unless you can gain insight into the actual conversation and improve it, all those efficiency improvements may be in vain.

Teams need reliable insight into what took place during the actual conversation, and it’s not just sales teams. Marketing, operations, and support can all benefit from the information extracted from a phone conversation, and the ability to share it throughout an organization makes it exponentially more powerful. To gain an understanding, they must rely on reps’ call notes, which can vary in consistency and may not even contain the right information. Furthermore, call notes are not accessible at scale, meaning they must be read on a one-to-one basis and cannot be used to draw any sort of decisive conclusions on a sales team’s performance.

Even if call recordings are used, sales reps can generate hundreds of calls per day, far too many for any manager to keep up with. The chances of being able to identify and act on a coachable conversation is miniscule.

The Next Level of Sales Performance

Conversation analytics generate data from the actual conversations themselves. They deliver analytics on talk-to-listen ratio, keyword usage, talk streaks, interactions, and more. Conversation analytics answer questions like:

• What is the optimal layout of a sales conversation?
• What is the perfect talk-to-listen ratio?
• What is the best number of questions to ask?
• Is it better to open the call with a compliment or question?
• How does the tone of a question effect the prospect’s response?

With conversation analytics you can coach reps’ sales conversations to increase their sales effectiveness, improve win rates, and generate more revenue to ensure that sales goals are met.

When conversation analytics are combined with AI, they open the door to call coaching at scale. The AI can actively find and surface key coaching moments within conversations, or monitor reports and notify sales managers when something needs to be addressed. It can alert a manager to when a rep is talking too much, interrupting their prospect, or even causing a negative sentiment. Sales managers can actively identify and improve rep conversations before they result in lost revenue.

This allows managers with teams of all sizes to coach reps on a one-to-one level. Conversation analytics applications can reveal which reps have what needs, so managers can properly develop training coach reps to improve their performance, resulting in better performance as a team.