What is sales conversation analytics?

Sales conversation analytics has the potential to benefit a range of industries and organizations, empowering them to improve sales cycles, convert more leads and optimize revenue streams. By leveraging sales conversation analytics, companies can do more with their own sales data. The information and insights that would otherwise end up amassed in solitary silos is put to use to help sales leaders better understand customers, prospects and their own sales reps.

Understanding how sales conversation analytics works, what metrics top-performing sales teams keep track of and how you can get the most out of the conversations you’re already having across your sales cycles is incredibly valuable. Below, we cover these topics of interest in greater detail to get you on track towards using your sales data more effectively.

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The Closer's Ultimate Guide to Conversation Analytics

Learn how to analyze customer conversations to improve sales performance

Definition of sales conversation analytics

There are plenty of sales activities that happen in the contact center – often B2C or one-and-done type sales. But for B2B organizations, their sales cycles and processes are multi-touch and more complex. These cycles can start with a cold outreach or inbound, and ultimately touch multiple individuals and teams before closing. Conversations during these cycles can happen across a range of channels too, from email and phone to video conferencing. Using sales intelligence software to gather data and assessing sales behavior and results across all of these touchpoints, organizations can improve sales outcomes across the organization and drive revenue.

To initiate the sales conversation analytics process, teams first turn to data mining, harvesting as much data on interactions as they have access to. These insights can come in many forms, from unexpected correlations between seemingly separate data sets to a more straightforward admixture of prospect and customer behavior crossed with historical data of how similar deals have closed.

Through sales conversation analytics, companies can identify where sales teams are falling short, where there are process inefficiencies throughout the sales cycle, and more – then fixing these issues before they begin to really dig into profits.

Key sales analytics metrics

There are several key sales analytics metrics that organizations can track to monitor performance and measure the impact of sales performance initiatives.

Sales growth

Sales growth is almost a no-brainer for tracking your company’s sales performance. After all, if your sales are not on an upward trajectory, you will instantly know that something needs to be done. Although this metric is not much use on its own when it comes to learning exactly what the problem with your sales process might be, it is highly effective for signaling that what you are doing is either working well or missing the mark.

Average contact value

This metric shows you how much an ongoing customer contract is worth by averaging and normalizing its value over one year. This may seem similar to the previous measurement, but it offers up an important difference that is worth taking note of. Namely, this metric shows you average deal size. In so doing, it can help to inform your customer acquisition decisions and adjust spend on both marketing and sales to reflect the actual return on investment.

Number of open opportunities

The number of open opportunities that your sales reps are working with at the moment can tell you a lot about the effectiveness of your sales process as well as your marketing efforts. If your team members are lacking leads, then it may be a good idea to reassess your current marketing strategy.

There are plenty of reasons why your inbound lead numbers might be a bit too low to help your sales reps land fresh conversions and given that roughly 79 percent of all marketing leads actually lead nowhere, it pays to push for wider reach and a bigger audience. Making an effort to more closely align your sales process with the expectations your marketing campaigns set new leads up with can bring about a positive change in this metric as well.

Close rates

Leveraging tools like CallMiner will provide insights into how agents are performing, and where there might be areas of improvement. If there is a rep with higher than average close rate, sales conversation analytics can help you determine why and then coach those behaviors across the rest of your team. Does that particular rep use a different script closing during cold calls? Do they conduct a discovery call or product demo different than the rest of the field?

By analyzing every interaction across channels – phone, email, chat, and more – you’ll gain a more comprehensive understanding of rep performance in real-time, informing other agents’ conversations with actionable insights to drive better outcomes.

Sales conversation analytics tips and best practices

Before you dive into your sales data in search of hidden insights about your prospect and customers and their needs, you’d do best to adopt the following best practices:

• Pair predictive sales tech with a full-featured sales CRM for better results. For bonus points and powerful insights, look into analyzing sales patterns of your target demographic and customer base.
• Keep track of any forecasts or predictions you make based on your analyses and available data. You can revisit these predictions at a later date and learn from them.
• Set goals frequently and work towards making them a reality. Although aiming for constant, incremental improvement is a worthy objective, without clear-cut and concrete goals, you are unlikely to find the process easy to measure or reason about. You may even find yourself doubting its effectiveness altogether. By setting goals progressively, you can push yourself and your team to ever higher heights without losing track of the big picture.

Sales conversation analytics plays an important role in optimizing the prospect journey and improving sales effectiveness. By monitoring the right metrics and leveraging conversation analytics to analyze sales behavior across every interaction, you can fine-tune your organization’s sales strategy, improve rep performance and boost the bottom line.