Sales, and especially telephone sales, have always been a bit of a dark art. It has been difficult to quantify the reasons behind failure and even more challenging to highlight the nuances that allow certain individuals to succeed. Businesses have been trying to remove the shroud of mystery surrounding sales for years. Sales coaching has improved over the recent decades and now much more is understood about the psychology of successful sales practice. In the modern age the more relevant issue has surrounded logistics. How can you analyse and then coach all of your sales staff without a vast team of expert sales coaches, each with infinite time to review each salesperson's processes? Dialpad think they have the answer.
Last week, the disruptive communication specialist, launched its latest innovation aiming to transform a sector of the market, Dialpad Sell. The platform incorporates Dialpad's expertise in Voice Intelligence to transcribe and digitise voice calls, then offers organisations detailed analytics relating to sentiment and content, all in real-time. UC Today spoke to Dialpad's Chief Strategy Officer, Dan O'Connell, to find out more.
Dialpad Sell draws on the foundations laid by the company's existing platforms. After acquiring TalkIQ in 2018 and introducing its VoiceAI offering, Sell, builds on the Dialpad Support platform which uses emerging technologies to enhance and improve real-time conversations between customers and agents in contact centres. Using speech recognition and natural language processing capabilities from TalkIQ allows Dialpad Sell to offer customers a transformative solution to radically enhance their outbound sales, without the need for a vast sales coaching teams.
"There was nobody in the market that was doing real-time transcription and offering understanding of conversations. We recognised that we could really leverage our expertise in cloud telephony, and then in speech recognition and NLP, to transform the sales process."
Sell can offer organisations enhancements across various aspects of the sales process. Recognising key words within conversations, such as competing brands, will immediately augment a live conversation with coaching tips, using LiveCoach, to offer counter balance in any discussion. Answering complex customer questions without the need to find reference material is also enabled, as LiveCoach will offer a selection suitable answers instantly to the agent. The system can also provide a check list or agenda tracking capabilities for the discussion, prompting sales staff to recall and relay any critical information relevant to the particular call. Having suitable information to overcome potential objections has always been a critical part of the sales process and Sell can provide this information to the agent as they come across potential obstacles. Even the delivery aspect of sales call can be improved with LiveCoach providing feedback on the conversational element of a salesperson's performance.
"We can tell them to slow down, if they are speaking too fast. If they do a long rambling monologue we can tell them it's probably a good time to ask a question."
Traditionally, a critical facet of sales coaching has been helping agents to understand subtle cues from customers. This process has often been problematic with a significant length of service seemingly the only way to garner enough experience to truly recognise key buying or disgruntlement signals. Now with Sell's live sentiment analysis agents with all levels of experience can see an indication of the customer's intent. One of Dialpad's key mantras has been the ability to offer its solutions across mediums. All of its solutions are designed to be mobile native, so as you would expect Sell is equally effective for the huge numbers of salespeople outside of an office who rely on their mobile phones as their key sales tool. O'Connell explains that this is another huge benefit as Dialpad can radically reduce the initial training time required for new salespeople.
