We are all familiar with sales conversational intelligence tools.
They listen for words and phrases, identifying patterns, and are often great for identifying opportunities for coaching your teammates.
However, conversation intelligence software falls short in interpreting the “vibe” that sellers are giving to customers. What tone am I giving off? Do I sound boring at points during my presentation? Am I saying “um” too much?
This is where voice analytics software comes into the mix.
In this brief article, I'll share the following:
- What is voice analytics software?
- The benefits of voice analytics tools for sales
- What is the VoiceVibes voice analytics technology?
- Voice analytics use cases to implement into your coaching program
What is voice analytics software?
Voice analytics software analyzes how you are perceived when you speak, going beyond the words you use to explore, and report back on, the overall quality of your delivery across multiple dimensions, including confidence, clarity, and more.
The benefits of voice analytics tools for sales
There are tons of research papers that describe how we communicate, both from the sender's and the receivers' perspectives. However, to simplify, let's look at this article from Psychology Today, which discusses The 4 Primary Principles of Communication.
The article notes the following:
- Feedback loops are critical for confirming effective communication of the intended message.
- "...verbal communication (the words used) is only one part of the larger communication process that includes body language, facial expression, tone of voice, and voice volume."
- "Whenever there is a discrepancy between the content (verbal) and feeling (nonverbal) of a message, the person on the receiving end will almost always give more weight to the feeling."
To fully understand the effectiveness of your customer-facing teams, you must go beyond simply analyzing the words they use.
Speech analytics, delivered through the category of tools called voice analytics software, must identify how the buyer feels and what they heard in the communication.
Still not sure?
A different Psychology Today article reminds us of the 55/38/7 communication rule where "55% of communication is body language, 38% is the tone of voice, and 7% is the actual words spoken."
While everyone acknowledges that these percentages are rules of thumb, not hard and fast rules, it gives us important insights to consider as we think about measuring the effectiveness of our communication.
How does this impact sellers?
When face to face
On average, conversational intelligence tools only measure 7% of communication measurement.
Speech analysis via voice analysis solutions provides us with 38% of the equation.
Our body language makes up the remaining 55%.
When remote
I haven't seen a study I fully agree with yet, but we all agree that body language becomes less critical in remote settings (as harder to judge).
When using voice only
For simplicity, we can assume that the ratios of the 55/38/7 rule apply, only without the 55% for body language. This conclusion means 16% of communication are the words, and the remaining 84% is the tone of voice.
Do you measure tone effectively today?
What is VoiceVibes’s voice analytics technology?
VoiceVibes, a Bigtincan company, is voice analytics software used for years to help people sound more natural and polished when they speak, so they can transform how others perceive them.
And it's good.
An independent study by Towson University showed that VoiceVibes successfully predicted 11 "vibes" (ways a human would perceive a voice) with at least 97% accuracy and all 20 vibes with at least 90% accuracy.
These vibes cover a range of positive and negative characteristics and include:
- Arrogant
- Assertive
- Authentic
- Belligerent
- Boring
- Captivating
- Clear
- Condescending
- Confusing
- Confident
- Detached
- Ditsy
- Energy
- Nervous
- Organized
- Personable
- Persuasive
- Pushy
- Timid
- Unapproachable
This mix of positive and negative vibes provides you with the feedback you and your teams need not simply to deliver the right words but to deliver them in a manner that your audience will best receive.
As a result of these capabilities and more, VoiceVibes is well-positioned to meet the following common challenges.
Sales managers have limited time to devote to coaching their reps
With VoiceVibes sales analytics software, sellers can “spot coach” on their own, any time, anywhere, getting results faster with convenient self-coaching available on-demand.
This ability to self-coach does not prevent managers and coaches from spot-coaching as well but does allow a degree of AI-assisted self-coaching, critical for scalability.
Sales managers may not know why a rep is struggling with the tone of their delivery and thus, can’t help them improve
VoiceVibes was built by linguistics experts and designed using millions of collected data points.
It uses AI to automatically score tone of voice for 20 different positive and negative tones of voice, enabling reps to quickly uncover every opportunity for tone of voice improvement with AI-driven scoring.
Sellers don’t always take guidance/feedback from their sales managers
While sellers don’t always take their managers seriously, VoiceVibes provides objective feedback that has helped people transform how they’re perceived.
Coaching effectiveness with science-based feedback is hard to ignore, easy to practice towards improvement and delivers results.
Sales managers struggle to provide consistent coaching across their team
VoiceVibes provides a consistent approach to coaching everyone. It is infinitely scalable for teams of 1 to 1 million.
As a result, you can build an entire team of confident, polished speakers with scalable, uniform coaching practices.
Voice analytics use cases to implement into your coaching program
If you did not know the 55/38/7 rule before, you probably felt that your conversational intelligence program was terrific. In all honesty, it's an excellent solution for scaling your listening and coaching efforts, but you should now realize it's not nearly enough.
You now know that 84% of the audio-based feedback must be on the tone, the vibe, that the customer-facing teammate is using.
Here are a few thoughts on how you can incorporate speech analysis into your Enablement program.
Continue using conversation intelligence
These tools do an incredible job covering the 8% of the information delivered from words alone and point out errors across your organization at scale.
Start small by incorporating speech analytics
As with any new technology to your business, start small with a pilot group of potential champions and key managers.
- Bring this group of 5-10 individuals together to develop your voice analysis coaching program.
- Pilot this new program within groups that these champions/managers reside in and get the team excited about the solution. Your perfect initial teams are those that live on the phone like your SDR/BDR teams.
- Use contests around specific vibes as you look to improve positive vibes like Clarity, Confidence, and Authenticity while coaching out negative vibes like boring, pushy, and detached.
- Measure. Are you seeing improvements in voice analytics leading to business outcomes (more meetings, for example)?
The power of feedback
Remember.
There are no silver bullets.
Excellent communication should leverage feedback loops along the conversational journey.
Confirm that sellers understand what their buyers are stating and vice versa.
Ensure that customer success professionals are on the same page with your customers (and customers with your customer success professionals).
Voice Analytics Software is likely missing from your coaching program
Many people are only just beginning to think about the next level of coaching, going beyond the words used to understand perception.
If you want to serve your customers and prospects better, you need to start putting voice analysis into your coaching program before your competitors do.
Want to see VoiceVibes in action? Get a demo today!
