Start Using AI to Improve Sales Over Zoom

In the not too distant past, traveling sales professionals would take their lead or prospect out to lunch in hopes of delivering the perfect sales pitch to land the next big deal. Due to all of the traveling and gathering restrictions currently in place, such meetings are still going on, but they shifted over to Zoom. While video conferencing may not be as personal as seeing someone face-to-face, AI is adding some extra value for the sales representatives, by analyzing their sales pitches and offering feedback. Let’s take a look at how this technology works and how it is helping sales professionals improve their selling skills. 

Honing Sales Skills With AI

In the old days, sales professionals would role-play various sales situations and offer each other feedback and advice on how to improve. AI tools are also offering insights that allow sales representatives to analyze their conversations any time they want and it frees up the time of more senior salespeople since the technology takes some of the training responsibilities off them. For example, a new tool called Chorus automatically transcribes speech and analyzes the conversation to offer valuable feedback such as moments where they are speaking too much, do not steer the conversation away from competitor products, forget to discuss follow-up steps, and many other details.

Such AI products rely on natural language processing (NLP) to understand human speech as well as named entity recognition and text annotation to identify keywords and phrases. This requires human data annotators to annotate thousands and thousands of pages of text for the system to correctly identify the needed pieces of information. This can be things like names of companies, people, products, and any other information critical to making the sale. The more data that is annotated to train the model, the more accurate the results will be and the range of insights will be increased as well. For example, Gong, a competitor of Chorus, offers additional information such as the best time to start a PowerPoint presentation during a video sales call. More data annotation work would be required to offer such insights and any additional ones as well. 

Benefits AI Can Offer Sales Professionals 

Since COVID-19 is not going away any time soon, sales professionals need to start adjusting to the new reality, where Zoom is the preferred method of interaction. This means that sales representatives will need to develop new skills and further hone existing ones to increase their numbers and meet their sales goals. In fact, the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business is now even offering a course on Zoom negotiations. Technologies like Chorus, Gong, and many others can help sales professionals take some of the mystique out of sales by honing persuasion skills and tactics that better work via Zoom. It could also offer a lot of additional opportunities for sales professionals such as higher levels of compensation, career prospects, promotions, and many other benefits.

Also, AI could help us restore some of the nuances of in-person in the digital workspace allowing all of the parties involved to feed off the energy in the virtual room. This would allow Zoom participants and presenters to understand whether people are engaged, bored, laughing at your jokes out of politeness or because they are actually funny and many other valuable insights that would otherwise be lost. AI allows you to restore emotional energy and allow the platform to detect and share everybody’s emotional reactions. The technology itself would gather metrics on how emotionally engaged the attendees are and share that with the presenter and the rest of the participants. 

Mindy Support is Helping to Develop Next-Gen AI Products

All of the technologies we mentioned above require a lot of highly detailed data annotation work to be performed, which is very time-consuming and expensive to do in-house. Mindy Support can take this work off your shoulder by offering comprehensive data annotation services to help you meet deadlines and your needs. Regardless of the size or complexity of your project, we will be able to assemble a team for you quickly and perform all of the annotation work correctly the first time of asking. We are one of the largest BPO providers in Europe with more than 2,000 employees all over Ukraine which allows us to scale your project without sacrificing the quality.  

Posted by Il’ya Dudkin