SALES DOESN’T SEEM MATURE FOR AUTOMATION, BUT IT IS

Algorithms cannot sell like a human being, but they can teach us sales fundamentals

Modern-day sales are more about long-term customer interactions than big, one-and-done deals.

This has always been true — smaller customer churn cuts promotion charges — but it’s especially true today, as everything from designer clothing to SaaS products moves toward a subscription model.

“The best way to be effective in sales is to understand yourself, know your customer and know how you create strong interactions with other people,” Samantha Harrington opined in Forbes.

“Once you’ve built that relationship, shown you care, and won their trust, you are on the road to making a customer,” Lee Ann Obringer wrote in HowStuffWorks.

Building trusting, enduring relationships does not sound like a process ripe for automation. Machine-learning algorithms can master repetitive, predictable, and, in a word, mechanical tasks — but despite the future foretold by Her, artificial intelligence has not yet understood to empathize or make jokes.

Yet AI tools have taken the sales world by storm. The key to their popularity? They automate almost everything but actual socializing.

“I want tech-enabled humans, not human-enabled tech.”

“I want tech-enabled humans, not human-enabled tech,” Jim Benton, CEO of Chorus.ai, told Built In. “I want the human at the front and center.”

Chorus.ai software sticks to that vision, offering salespeople AI-based coaching and recapping of their calls. It surfaces tactics that have worked with similar clients on past calls — which could mean underlining a specific product feature or talking less and listening more.

Benton calls this “conversational intelligence.”

AI CAN’T HOLD A CONVERSATION, BUT IT CAN ANALYZE ONE

Based on the assessment of five million sales calls from more than 300 companies, Chorus.ai recently circulated a round-up of macro trends in sales calls in the report called “The State of Conversation Intelligence 2020.”

A smattering of findings: The average sales cycle takes 91 days, and it takes the average sales development representative roughly 106 cold calls to schedule one meeting. On successful calls, salespeople tend to speak for 40 to 60 percent of the “talk time,” and always set the next steps, which Benton calls “a critical component.”

On successful calls, salespeople tend to speak for 40 to 60 percent of the “talk time,” and always set the next steps.

(If Chorus.ai cannot see a rep planning the next steps in a call, it flags that call in red.)

Since shelter-in-place orders rolled out across the country to combat the coronavirus, the structure of sales calls has also shifted slightly, Benton noted. For one, CFOs have been invited to 91 percent more sales calls. For other reps have begun moving into their demos an average of two minutes later than they used to — likely because salespeople are doing longer check-ins, or “doing a little bit more empathy.”

These strong trends aren’t the company’s bread and butter, though. In The Long Run, the ideal sales plan differs depending on the product and the clientele. Chorus.ai facilitates companies to find their own, personalized best moves, offering salespeople tips based on tactics that have correlated with success on their company’s other sales calls.

The software calculates success, or lack thereof, through an integration with the client’s CRM. There, it tracks which calls move a deal through a sales channel or communicate with expansions in a contract's price tag.

It drives backward from there, checking successful video call footage, via Zoom integration, for intelligence. It finds trends among the successful calls — phrases and strategies that crop up again and again — and encourages sales reps to try them out.

You could say it is automating management, but let’s be honest: No manager has time to listen to all their salespeople’s calls.

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