Think your sales team is doing pretty well?
Now you can find out for certain.
The conversational intelligence platform, Chorus.ai recently announced its findings from the 2020 State of Conversation Intelligence study. This report shows what a good sales call looks like at every stage of the cycle, with data from more than 5 million recorded calls and 300 companies.
This new documentation offers sales leaders a host of industry benchmarks to work with, allowing sales teams and managers to compare and improve on their strategies for growth. Interestingly, some of the findings in the report are counter-intuitive to what some professionals believe. For instance, competitors are often mentioned more in discovery meetings with closed-won deals than in lost deals. Additionally, the more the competitor is mentioned during early-stage conversations, the better the results for the sales company.
On the other hand, talking about other brands during late-stage discussions can lead to deals lost. Sales representatives will need to embrace the discussion around their competitors early on, rather than shying away from it.
A New Era for Sales Coaching
According to Mike Faber, the Leading Manager of Enablement at Zoom, sales coaching for the team has taken on a new life after using the State of Conversation Intelligence Report. The team uses the report for manager and rep training with insights into engaging moments, questions, and more. Additional useful findings from the report include:
- Closed lost and closed won deals take around the same amount of time to complete: The average won deal was closed in 96 days, while the average lost deal took around 87 days. Chorus suggests that if your sales representatives spend months on a deal to lose it, they may need to double-check their discovery period and put more effort into research
- Successful cold calls are long but feature less talk-time than expected: The report shows that average cold calls lasted around 132 seconds, with most successful calls lasting 7.5 minutes. The talk time on cold calls with representatives was around half the total time, and often lead to around 2 or 3 questions from prospects. Sales representatives need coaching to ensure their talk track is controlled and confident in this environment
- Managers aren’t investing in coaching early enough: Chorus also found that around 60% of managers only coach late-stage deals. However, top managers also coach around 63% of early deals and get 30% higher win rates when they do. Managers need to start assisting representatives earlier in the process. Coaching shouldn’t be just for the deal, but also for learning about how to win the deal in the long-run
Creating More Successful Sales Teams
According to the VP of Marketing for Chorus.ai, Natalie Severino, the most successful sales teams today are coached constantly, and empowered by data. The state of conversation intelligence report provides everyone with an opportunity to align and gauge their own metrics against the most successful teams in the industry.
There are a lot of fantastic insights available from the full Chorus report, which segments data into the size of the businesses analysed.
