The one thing missing from your sales engagement tech stack

The sales engagement tech stack has gotten a lot of attention recently, and with good reason. From the email platforms that target prospects, to the conferencing tools that bring together key stakeholders, these technologies are the foundation of how sales teams engage with customers and have a major impact on the buyer experience.

However, I continue to find one thing missing from nearly every tech stack I’ve worked with. Voice. That’s right, the humble telephone.

Companies continue to invest heavily in email automation platforms, live chat, power dialers, and various other solutions. But when 92% of all customer interactions happen over the phone, according to Salesforce.com, telephony should be on every sales team's radar. By implementing a phone system purposefully built to enable sales, organizations can impact conversations in ways never before possible.

Create a better seller/buyer experience

Despite how often organizations are interacting with their customers over the phone, Salesforce research shows that 85% of customers reported being dissatisfied with their phone experience. Using a modern phone system that combines voice calls, business text messaging, and video conferencing into a single platform, organizations can create a streamlined experience for both buyers and sellers. In addition to this, many modern enterprise phone systems enable sales reps to work from anywhere, on any device—improving workflows and employee productivity.

Provide real-time coaching with AI-powered telephony

Sales AI is rapidly gaining traction. Not to replace sellers, but to help them be more effective. By implementing a telephony tool with AI, reps are provided with the guidance they need, when they need it. This can come in the form of live speech coaching, real-time recommendations that suggest the next best action, or in the moment, sentiment analysis that can let managers know if their presence is needed.

Sirius Decisions sees “AI exponentially increasing the impact sales operations has on sales results by enabling sales operations to finally provide sales reps at all levels with the sales intelligence they deserve to receive.”

Access to the last offline data-set: voice

Every member of your sales team is using the phone to interact with customers. Yet, many organizations aren’t investing in tools to help their teams make each conversation count. While organizations have been able to analyze text-based communications for insights and best practices, voice has always been a challenge. However, with real-time voice transcription and automatic CRM logging of sales activity (e.g., calls, meetings, emails, texts), this previously offline data-set is now available for the larger organization to access and analyze.

To help companies capture the insights that live in their conversations, Dialpad has built a dedicated communications platform for sales organizations that incorporates real-time recommendations, live coaching, call logging, and sentiment analysis. Now sales and marketing teams can see how pitches are resonating, uncover best practices, and better understand how buyers and sellers are interacting. The end result? Reps will get better at listening, better at overcoming objections, better at moving deals forward, and ultimately, better at closing them.