Conversational Intelligence: What sales meetings have been missing

Meetings are undeniably crucial to the buyer experience

Whether they happen digitally or in person, meetings are the most important touchpoints sellers have with buyers. Everything else—emails, social posts, blogs, eBooks, infographics, and research reports—is about securing that all-important meeting. When meetings go well, deals close; when they don’t, deals die—or stall if you’re lucky.

But despite how critical they are to the buyer experience, meetings remain shrouded in mystery because, unless they’re recorded and shared, only those who attend them have an idea how they went. And even anecdotal accounts could be biased or skewed. Sure, recordings shed more light, but they’re not often referenced. Accessing them can be difficult, and reviewing them takes too much time. Let’s face it: after a full day of meetings, the last thing anyone wants to do is listen to another meeting they didn’t attend. Even the most in-tune sales leaders can’t scale this activity. It might be manageable if you only have a few direct reports, but not when you have a bigger team.

These roadblocks make it hard to evaluate how sellers are conducting their meetings, let alone implement best practices for improvement. And improvement is much needed because buyers generally say that sellers don’t sufficiently understand them. According to Salesforce, while 66% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs, only 34% of companies actually do. Furthermore, today’s buyer is more informed than ever, spending only 5% of the sales cycle with a seller right at the cusp of making a purchasing decision. So, meetings really are “make-or-break” scenarios. Add the fact that only 53% of sellers say the tech they use improves their productivity and results, and it’s safe to assume that “break” is too often the outcome.

So, given how important meetings are and how they represent a historically small window of opportunity, the question is, why aren’t sellers upping their game?

The answer is they’re not being enabled to.

Meetings are hard to get right

Meetings put a lot of pressure on sellers, not just because they’re inherently important, but because they require so much work—before, during, and after. Preparing for a meeting takes too long because relevant content is scattered across different repositories, and tailoring it to a specific conversation is time-consuming; presenting a meeting is strenuous because taking notes, answering unexpected questions, detecting buyer sentiment, and avoiding ratholes make for one heck of a juggling act; and following up to retain buyer engagement requires either a lengthy recording or a perfect memory to ensure all outstanding questions and concerns are addressed in a timely manner.

And it’s not just sellers who could benefit from a better approach to meetings. Imagine if those who never attend them could still derive truly objective insights from every recorded meeting at scale. The potential to replicate meeting success across an entire salesforce would be limitless, influencing strategies throughout the go-to-market org, from training and coaching to content effectiveness and buyer experience.

Enablement technology modernises meetings for the needs of today’s sellers

To streamline meeting preparation, enablement technology not only allows sellers to surface the most relevant content they need from a single library, but they can also automatically schedule a meeting, generate its agenda, and personalise content in minutes via dynamic layouts that are populated based on that agenda and the buyer’s account or opportunity in a CRM. Furthermore, sellers can curate all their content into a playlist so it’s ready to go with the click of a mouse. They can even practise their pitch via virtual dry runs that leverage artificial intelligence (AI)-powered sentiment analysis to measure their clarity, confidence, and credibility.

During a meeting, a seller’s presentation can unfold more seamlessly because they can quickly switch between presenters or toggle content, discreetly view speaker notes and other references, and quickly respond to any random question by typing it into an extension on their internet browser or in Slack, eliciting a bot that provides an immediate answer that’s been crowd-sourced and validated by subject-matter experts across their organisation.

Conversational intelligence captures buyer sentiment

Using AI, conversational intelligence software analyses speech and text to capture action items and insights that are then delivered via an automatically generated summary and transcript. Sellers can then use that information to quickly follow up after the meeting, addressing every outstanding concern and sharing supplemental content to sustain interest via a digital sales room or automatic, AI-generated email.

And as touched on above, this conversational intelligence technology can do wonders for more than just those who attended the meeting. Sales managers and those on the enablement team will get detailed visibility into what topics came up that required more support and who spoke about what, shedding light on whether training information is being retained and how coaching sessions can be adjusted to promote better behaviours.

Seismic is the only solution combining content, learning, conversational intelligence, and generative AI for a complete meeting workflow

Different from revenue intelligence companies that use conversational intelligence for pipeline forecasting and related deal trends data, Seismic, the global leader in enablement, recognised the potential for how this software could streamline the end-to-end meeting workflow. This includes all the external aspects that go into supporting a meeting, such as training and coaching, content effectiveness based on what assets are working, in-the-moment responsiveness, and ongoing relationship management, all of which deepen buyer engagement and keep deals moving forward. We call this solution Seismic for Meetings.

Interested in learning more? Request a demo today.