Taking the guesswork our of sales effectiveness with ai

This article was originally published on ThinkGrowth.org Think about the mid-to-late 90’s. What was the status quo for the Internet marketer? Guesswork. Marketing analytics technologies had not yet emerged as a tool-of-the-trade, so marketers would create their online campaigns and hope they worked. Today that would be unheard of. Any marketer operating without analytics, measurement, and technology would be out of a job soon. Analytics and marketing technologies have turned Internet marketing from mostly art to mostly science. Marketers can easily measure what’s working (and what’s not) — continually optimizing every element of their campaigns for higher conversion, more customers, and greater ROI. Internet marketing has become one of the most optimized disciplines in the business world.

The sales profession has been a different story. Sales professionals, managers, and leaders have been operating with the same blindfold that plagued the Internet marketing profession before analytics arrived. We rely on what we think works in sales. We have our theories, instincts, intuition, and anecdotal experiences. But (until recently) there has been no technology, data, or sales analytics that has measure what is actually getting results in sales.

During the first half of 2016, we analyzed anonymous conversation data from 17 of our customers using Gong’s sales conversation intelligence SaaS platform. These customers were typically mid-market SaaS companies. Here are the details of how we surfaced the data and insights I’ll talk about in the rest of this post:

• We analyzed 25,537 B2B sales conversations from 17 customer organizations. These were sales calls conducted on conference call platforms like GoToMeeting, join.me, and Zoom. In other words these were account executive calls rather than SDR calls (fun fact: the average call ran 43 minutes long)
• Each call was recorded using Gong, speaker-separated, cleaned, and transcribed from speech-to-text
• Next, the calls were mapped to their matching CRM records. This gave us the power to analyze against sales outcomes such as win-rates, revenue production, and sales cycle length
• Finally, we ran Gong’s artificial intelligence engine through the massive data set. Call topics, key moments, and sales behaviors were auto-categorized using sophisticated AI algorithms
• We found 9 distinct trends of high-performing B2B sales calls. Here they are:

“When do you plan on moving forward with this project?”

“When do you estimate getting this agreement finalized?”

“What does your timeline look like for purchase?”

positive“We need to figure out [fill in the blank],”

“We need to figure out who gives the final go-ahead for this”

“We have to figure out how we will use the product internally”

“We’ve got to figure out how we are going to justify ROI”

second soothe your prospect’s pre-purchase anxiety by mitigating their risk. proactively, frequently, and aggressively

• Easy cancellations
• No long-term contract
• Easy, low-effort setup
• 90-day opt-outs
• Money-back guarantees
• SLAs (service-level agreements)

To sum this up, here is what artificial intelligence has revealed to us so far about sales call effectiveness:

• The “ideal” talk-to-listen ratio is 43:57
• Most sales reps speak 65–75% of their calls
• Bumping a prospect’s talk-time from 22% to 33% delivers a sharp increase in win-rates
• If pricing comes up 3–4x in a call, consider it a buying signal
• Top sales professionals typically discuss pricing late in the call (40–49 minutes in on average)
• When your prospect responds to your timeline question with the word “probably,” consider it a good thing
• When prospects respond to your timeline question with the phrase “ We need to figure out X, ” you’ve got your work cut out for you
• When you sooth your prospect’s fears with risk-reversal language (such as “you can cancel at any time”), win-rates on average increase 32%
• Conversation-level sales coaching leads to higher win-rates, more revenue, and shorter sales cycles

Now that we’ve brought the sales world the first wave of data-driven sales conversation insights, I’love to hear what you think. What questions do you have for me? What surprised you? What validated what you already knew? And if you could, would you please this article on LinkedIn and Twitter so other sales professionals may find this data as well? If you liked this article you may also be interested in:

• First sales call – 30 or 60 min? New data shows how long your first sales call should be
• Sales call coaching – Data-driven Habits of Effective Sales Leaders
• B2B Sales Intelligence – Gong.io Introduces Real-time Conversation Intelligence for B2B Sales Teams
• Words that sell – These Are 7 Words That will make the difference