TechBytes with Parth Mukherjee, Head of Product Marketing at Chorus.ai

Tell us about your role and the team/technology at Chorus.ai

Chorus.ai is the leading Conversation Intelligence Platform which identifies and helps teams replicate the performance of top-performing reps by analyzing their Sales meetings. These insights serve as the foundation of an effective coaching strategy for Sales and customer success teams and provide insight into the voice-of-the-customer across the entire organization.

Chorus.ai’s advanced Speech Recognition, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI technology enable teams to immediately discover moments that impact selling outcomes and use those insights for real-time Sales coaching and to replicate Sales best practices. The company’s proprietary AI automatically identifies and curates such moments for Sales and customer success teams, thus freeing Sales representatives to focus on building relationships.

Which AI tools form the foundation of any Sales Call analytics?

According to Gartner, “AI tools offer white-space analysis for Sales and can recommend immediate action on opportunities. Machine Learning, natural-language understanding and Natural-Language Processing can help analyze customer sentiment and customer feedback at scale.”

Chorus’ AI works to capture, summarize and enter call notes into your CRM, enabling humans to do what they do best – build relationships. Our sophisticated AI was built completely in-house so the solution learns vertical and customer-specific language. This increases the accuracy and value to customers by providing unprecedented visibility and reporting on CRM opportunities and activities.

Using this AI means our customers can receive benefits of the platform without any additional programming. Chorus’ AI will automatically learn important aspects of a customer’s Sales conversations and analyze them against business outcomes. It then surfaces Smart Themes, that are common across a sales organization’s conversations and will automatically start highlighting and tracking them across calls. Smart Themes utilizes Chorus.ai’s AI technology and through a process of unsupervised learning, proactively identifies patterns and themes within conversations and organizes them for easy access to insights.

How do you help customers to measure their ROI/Performance of these tools?

When customers are searching for a Conversation Intelligence tool to implement, many are looking for tools to help them speed up their ramp times when onboarding new reps. In Chorus.ai’s State of Conversation Intelligence report, we were able to pull from our customers’ conversations with their prospects and analyzed which conversations could result in the next steps or the prospect’s pain points.

To help customers measure the success of the tools, Chorus.ai recently launched its “Smart Playlist” technology. Smart Playlists help managers automatically curate a collection of their most important call moments to train reps. Designed to improve how leaders manage Sales teams, Smart Playlists curates a collection of the most important call moments to train and onboard reps.

What is the current state of Conversational AI and how it impacts Sales funnels?

Conversational AI is becoming increasingly popular, with many enterprises benefiting from more efficient Sales calls due to Conversation Intelligence. By monitoring customer and prospect conversations, enterprises can hone in on key messaging that is resonating best with their customers through each step of the Sales funnel.

What are the key takeaways from your recent report on Conversation Intelligence?

Below are some key insights from the Chorus.ai’s State of Conversation Intelligence Report, in which over 1 million Sales calls were reviewed and analyzed.

• Engaging moments (when prospects answer a question for >30 seconds) are the key to success in early-stage calls. Knowing this, reps should ask engaging questions and listen more than they talk.
• The average cold call resulting in a booked meeting takes 7.5 minutes.
• Cold calling is tough and only works if reps have a precise understanding of how to frame questions around pain, value, social proof, and qualification. Only 10% of cold calls had a call duration longer than 2 minutes.
• Two-way video increases success rates by 9 percentage points.
• Usually, more than one stakeholder is required to close a deal. Discovery and late-stage Sales calls included more than 1 prospect.
• Shorter demos are more engaging for a prospect. The average demo length was 29 minutes during the discovery stage.

How are these insights relevant to SaaS and Cloud industries?

Over the past couple of years, the SaaS and Cloud industry has gained a tremendous amount of momentum. SaaS companies are growing at an alarming rate, so when onboarding a new Sales rep, the ramp time needs to be quick in order to keep up with demand. The key insights above can help a company increase efficiency and productivity to better understand their customers and make the most out of their Sales calls.

Apart from Sales and Marketing, which other verticals can hugely benefit from leveraging these capabilities in Conversation Intelligence?

Aside from Sales and Marketing, the Product department can benefit from a Conversation Intelligence platform. Product teams are able to get information about what product features want while Marketing can learn exactly what messaging is resonating with prospects.

Pricing is another area that can benefit from a Conversation Intelligence platform. When a Sales representative is talking about the pricing model, it allows customers to give their feedback.

Why should Sales and Customer Service teams build their AI capabilities?

AI-powered insights can increase team productivity by 30%. A report from Gartner states, “AI can augment humans, as it can classify information and make predictions faster and at higher volumes than humans can accomplish on their own.” Allowing tasks that are deemed mundane or monotonous to be automated so employees can focus their time on other mission-critical projects.

For Sales, AI can help in a variety of different ways. Currently, there has been a rise in CRMs implementing AI into their platforms. This helps Sales reps and leaders with forecasting, market trends, price optimization and more. For customer service, AI is helping improve customer experience with the addition of chatbots, virtual assistants, and helping with day-to-day processes like logging information into the CRM.