A Blog by Jonathan Low

 

Oct 13, 2020

How AI Is Influencing Pandemic-Era Remote Sales Calls

AI is tracking remote sales call effectiveness, rating everything from engagement to outcomes. 

While Orwellian, sales has been moving in this direction for some time and those who choose to work in this profession are adapting to it - or leaving. JL

Will Knight reports in Wired:

Companies are artificial intelligence to track and analyze their salesforce’s virtual pitches.It automatically transcribes speech, showing when salespeople speak too much, fail to steer the conversation away from competitors’ products, or forget to plan a follow-up chat. AI to track engagement in voice calls used in call centers is spreading more widely.“There are a lot more verifiable interactions. That would play a role, [with] implications for compensation, career prospects and promotions.”

THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC has converted thousands of salespeople from road warriors to Zoom warriors. Some companies are making the most of this shift by using tools powered by artificial intelligence to track and analyze their salesforce’s virtual pitches.

“You definitely miss the lunch, the dinner, the happy hour,” says Jeramee Waldum, vice president of global sales at MavenLink, a maker of project management software whose dozens of once-traveling salespeople are now stuck behind webcams.

Before Covid, Waldum says, the MavenLink sales team spent roughly half its time on the road, treating customers to lunches, holding seminars with prospective clients, and chasing down signatures to close a deal. “We’ve had to get creative,” Waldum says. “We've done the virtual wine tastings, we've done virtual lunches.”

Besides such innovations, MavenLink uses a tool called Chorus to record and analyze sales video calls. It automatically transcribes speech, showing for example when salespeople speak too much, fail to steer the conversation away from competitors’ products, or forget to plan a follow-up chat.

Waldum says Chorus helped his team land a recent deal by quickly highlighting a client’s concerns about finding and allocating staff for projects. After analyzing previous calls, MavenLink pitched a newly developed database product for managing staff.

Gwen Wiscount, a sales executive at FullFunnel, a marketing firm, says Chorus alerted her to how quickly she was talking, and how this confused others in meetings. FullFunnel also sells other companies’ software. Wiscount says Chorus highlighted how often prospective clients complained about the cost of some of those packages; FullFunnel passed on the concerns, she says.

With in-person meetings gone for now, more companies are testing AI tools for analyzing calls. Technology that uses AI to track engagement in voice calls was being used in call centers before the pandemic. Now, they are spreading more widely.

“These tools are having a huge impact,” says Mark Roberge, a lecturer at Harvard Business School and former chief revenue officer of the HubSpot, which sells sales and marketing software. Roberge says some high-performing sales teams have long recorded and analyzed sales calls, and tools like Chorus make it easier for managers to see where someone went wrong. But the practice is a big shift for salespeople used to operating on their own, without anyone looking over their shoulder.

Soon, the tools may monitor what’s happening onscreen too. Software from Gong, a competitor to Chorus that raised $200 million in funding in August, can recommend the best moment to start a slideshow presentation during a video call. Cofounder and CEO Amit Bendov says the company plans to invest in research on analyzing video interactions.

Covid could have a lasting effect on the world of sales. Roberge says companies have been moving towards more remote selling for some time, and many executives have told him they plan to step this up. “Covid is accelerating many technological evolutions,” Roberge says. “In sales, that is definitely the case.”


For some salespeople, working over Zoom and having meetings recorded and scrutinized may be jarring. Others, who are already accustomed to having colleagues and managers listen to their calls, say they find tools such as Chorus and Gong helpful. A few said they liked the way it automatically transcribes calls and offers suggestions.

Darren Phan, who manages a sales team at Criteria, an HR software company that uses Gong, says in his experience few people object to being monitored. One person who objected to being micromanaged, he notes, was in fact doing a poor job and is no longer with the firm.

AI sales tools seem to be most popular, for now, among tech-focused companies. But the pandemic could help similar tools gain a foothold in more businesses, and even perhaps encourage a shift away from so many in-person sales meetings.

Sanjog Misra, a professor of marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, says AI analytics tools remove some of the mystique from sales. “Everybody thought of it as a creative exercise, more about persuasion than information” he says. “That’s shifting now.”

Misra agrees that such tools could find their ways into many other areas of work. Another professor at Booth recently started teaching a course called Zoom negotiations, which has proven very popular. “There are a lot more verifiable interactions,” he says. “It’s not very hard to see how that would play a role, [with] implications for things like compensation or for career prospects and promotions.”

For salespeople and the rest of us, however, there is such a thing as too much Zoom. “Our business is doing better than ever,” says Waldum of MavenLink. “The biggest thing that we're seeing is [video] meeting fatigue. We're in the process right now of kind of dialing back a bit.”

1 comments:

Robert Earl said...

HAVE YOU LOST YOUR HARD EARNED FUNDS TO THE WRONG HANDS?
MEET THE PROFESSIONAL HACKERS FOR HIRE TODAY.
⏱️ 3min Read
�� Hiring a professional hacker has been one of the world's most technical valued navigating information.
Regarding:
•Recovery Of Lost Funds,
•Mobile Phone Hack.(Catching A Cheating Spouse).
•Credit Score Upgrade,
VARIOUS HACKTIVITIES via
leroysteckler@gmail.com
High prolific information and Priviledges comes rare as it has been understood that what people do not see, they will never know. The affirmative ability to convey a profitable information Systematically is the majoy factor to success.
Welcome to the Global KOS hacking agency where every request on hacking related issues are fixed within a short period of time.
When you wonder “which hacking company should I hire, the first aspect that should concern you is Sincerity. Secondly, Rapid response. Clearly, you want to embark for services that povides swift response, With our astonishing Hackers, you will be glad to find out that our services Implies precision and action.
This post is definitely for those who are willing to turn their lives around for the better, either financial-wise, relationship-wise or businesses.
The manual Operation of this hackers is to potentially deploy a distinguished hacking techniques to penetrating computers.
If your shoe fits in any of the services below, you will be assigned to a designated professional hacker who is systematically known for operating on a dark web V-link protocol.
Providing value added services to clients as a hacker has been our sustaining goal.
Are you faced with cyber challenges like
��Recovery of lost funds:✅(BITCOIN INVESTMENTS, BINARY OPTIONS, LOAN AND TRADING FOREX WITH FORGERY BROKERS.) ��️I would try my possible best to shortly explain this in particular.
This shocking study points to one harsh reality we all face today. It saddens our mind when client expresses annoyance or dissatisfaction of unethical behaviours of scammers. We have striven to make tenacious efforts to help those who are victims of this flees get off their traumatic feeling of loss. The cyber security technique used to retrieving back the victims stolen funds is the application of a diverse intercall XX breacher software enables you track the data location of a scammer. Extracting every informations on the con database. Every information required by the Global KOS would be used to tracking every transaction, time and location of the scammer. This is acheived using the systematic courier tracking base method•
However, there are secret cyber infiltrators called brokers and doom. The particular system used by this scammers permeates them to manupulate targets digital trading system or monetary fund based accounts. Strictly using a dark web rob to diverting successful trades into a negative outcome. This process bends to thier advantage while investors results to losing massive amount of money. An act of gaining access to an organization or databased system to cause damages. We have worked so hard to ensure our services gives you a 100% trading success to recover all your losses•
�� HACKING A MOBILE PHONE:.✅ Do you think you are being cheated on? Curious to know what your lover is up to online? This type of hack helps you track every movement of your cheater as we are bent on helping you gain full remote access into the cheater's mobile phone using a Trojan breach cracking system to penetrate their social media platforms like Facebook, whatsapp, snapchat etc.
The company is large enough to provide comprehensive range of services such as•
• Email hacks��
• Hacking of websites.��
• Uber free payment hacks.��
Our strength is based on the ability to help fix cyber problems by bringing together active cyber hacking professionals in the GlobalkOS to work with.
Contact:
✉️Email: theglobalkos@gmail.com
Leroysteckler@gmail.com
®Global KOS™
2020.

Post a Comment