How to use AI to improve your win rates
How to use AI to improve your win rates
There's a killer tool for that
Today’s buyers want more than just a product
Today’s buyers are busier than ever. They want a partner who will listen to their needs, help them find the right solution to their problems. and be responsive to their questions.
This gives salespeople with strong active listening skills a big advantage over their peers because when you listen well, you understand your customers’ problem, arrive at the right conclusion, prescribe the correct solution, gain credibility, gain trust and increase the likelihood of winning.
Most salespeople will tell you they are good listeners but when you watch a few recordings of their sales calls, you quickly see a lot of room for improvement. They ask a couple of questions, hear an answer that gives them happy ears and then launch into a monologue about their company or their product. The customer gets bored and frustrated, slowly disengages and stops responding after the call. It happens all the time and makes the job of improving your team’s active listening skills paramount in today’s competitive market.
Here’s how most sales managers approach improving their reps’ active listening skills
Ask each salesperson to send you a couple of recent sales calls for feedback.
Listen to the calls at 1.5x speed and identify the moments when the customer says something important that the rep either does not pick up on and ask a follow up question about, or that just triggers the rep into delivering a monologue.
Write up the feedback, highlighting the moments, recapping what the customer said, why it was important and suggesting follow up questions that the rep could have asked.
Share the feedback with the rep and discuss in their next 1:1 coaching session.
Repeat until the skill improves.
But here’s the problem with that approach
It’s very time consuming. Most sales calls are 45 minutes, so even with a small team of 4 AEs and just 2 calls per AE, the manager has to listen to and provide feedback on at least 6 hours of calls.
It’s not comprehensive. If you ask your reps to send you calls to listen to, they’ll invariably pick the outliers, good and bad, so you can’t tell if its a one-off issue or a pattern of behavior. The fact is you never learn as much from outliers as you can from the run of the mill calls that feel ok at the time but end up turning into losses.
It’s a slow feedback loop. A rep may have to wait a week or more to get feedback on a call. By then it’s usually too late to save the deal and there’s a strong chance they’ll have made the same mistake again and again on other deals.
The new way to fix this is with a Sales AI platform like Attention
Sales AI platforms are an exciting new type of tech that collect sales data, automate manual processes and provide insights and recommendations without needing to wade through data manually.
I’ve teamed up with Attention, an exciting new Sales AI platform to tell you about how they have solved this problem for 150+ companies including Friendbuy, Finch and Mailshake.
Attention is a Sales AI platform that helps sales teams onboard new representatives quickly with real-time coaching intelligence, maintain effortless CRM hygiene, generate AI-assisted follow-up emails after calls, and improve sales forecasting by ensuring reps adhere to sales methodologies.
Attention also provides reps with actionable insights during and after calls, aligns sales messaging across the team, and has proven to reduce sales cycle lengths and expedite onboarding processes
With Attention you can:
Give your sales reps immediate written feedback on a sales call, highlighting important cues that were missed, follow up questions that could have been asked and objections.
Give your sales reps a drafted follow up email to send to their buyer right after the call with a summary of what was discussed and the next steps.
Give your sales reps time back by automatically filling out the CRM, with key deal information such as who attended, what was discussed and next steps.
Easily spot deals that are unlikely to close due to gaps such as a lack of critical event or too few stakeholders engaged.
Here’s an example summary of a sales call, showing the depth of coaching insight you can get when using Attention.
It blows away the tracker-based summaries that I’ve seen in other tools like Chorus and Gong, which is why I got so excited when I first saw the product.
Want to learn more about Attention?
Go to Attention’s website to see it in action for yourself. It’s awesome.
PS Many thanks to Attention for supporting this post!