Twenty years ago, potential buyers were almost entirely dependent on sales personnel as the primary source of information regarding their purchases. These days, 70% of research is already completed by leads by the time they talk to a sales rep. And 59% prefer not to talk to sellers at all.
That's why building your sellers' conversational skills is more important than ever. Customers are already uncomfortable speaking to sellers — so your team needs to be prepared to put them at ease during every interaction.
Conversational intelligence tools play an important role in your enablement efforts, empowering customer-facing teams to constantly be on-message and on-task, increasing buyer satisfaction, leading to higher win rates, deal sizes, and more revenue for your business.
At Bigtincan, we are big fans of conversational intelligence tools. We have built integrations with Chorus and Gong and added our own capabilities to help you maximize your investment.
In this article, we’re going to take a look at:
- What is conversational intelligence (CI)
- Why are conversational intelligence tools important for customer-facing teams
- Insights and comparison of Gong vs. Chorus vs. VoiceVibes
- Our integrations with existing conversational intelligence tools
- Our own conversational intelligence capabilities
Get a demo of Bigtincan's conversational intelligence capabilities or keep reading to learn more.
What is conversational intelligence and why is it important?
Forrester defines Conversation Intelligence as: “Solutions for extracting actionable insights from spoken conversations with customers (e.g., phone calls, videoconferencing interactions, or other recorded conversations) for business purposes”. This includes email, phone, messages, and virtual meetings.
What you say and how you say it has an enormous impact on how much business comes your way. By recording and analyzing company sales conversations, AI can be leveraged to analyze what is working during sales calls, and what isn’t.
With so much competition, customers no longer choose a product simply on its merits. They also choose based on their experience with the company selling it. Sellers are often the first touchpoint in that customer’s experiential journey.
Conversational intelligence analyzes both written and verbal communications — emails, texts, sales calls — and aggregates conversational data to establish the company’s weak and strong points. Through effective machine learning, the most successful conversations can then be used as a model and presented in a way to teach the rest of the sales team what’s working.
Gong overview — what is Gong?
Gong is a conversational intelligence platform, with its offering centered around recording, transcribing, and analyzing sales calls and emails. Companies connect their sellers’ calendars to the Gong platform, and the “Gong bot” then jumps in to record, transcribe, and analyze those calls. Shared screens and video streams are also recorded.
Key features of Gong
Gong’s primary offering is conversational intelligence. From this primary service, it is then able to offer AI-driven insights into deals, people, and a company’s marketing channels.
Gong records and analyzes video calls, phone calls, emails, and messages. It also pulls data from the company’s chosen CRM, converting that data into meaningful analytics reports.
The combination of these factors provides what Gong refers to as “Revenue Intelligence,” which breaks down into:
- Deal Intelligence: Identifying churn signals and spotting deal risks.
- People Intelligence: Discovering what the best reps do, to teach it to other reps.
- Market Intelligence: Insights to help companies with a go-to-market and messaging strategy.
What Gong does well
Gong is an excellent sales facilitation tool. It displays customer interactions at a glance on the screen so that sellers can assess deal health. If a sale looks like it’s going south, the tool displays a warning.
Its AI feature picks top sales performers as models to be followed by the rest of the team, analyzing what those top performers are doing differently. Based on this, sales managers can offer personalized coaching to improve performance. The tool also identifies topics that reps should talk about more or less to increase close rates.
Buyer conversation analysis shows which competitors and issues are at the top of buyers’ minds.
Chorus overview — what is Chorus?
Like Gong, Chorus is a dedicated conversation analysis tool, focusing on direct feedback by recording and analyzing company conversations. Chorus also offers various “add-on” products that provide insight into a company’s sales, both at a macro and micro-level.
What differentiates it from Gong is that it integrates deeply into a company’s other apps such as Gmail, Outlook, HubSpot, and Salesforce, and provides insight directly within those apps.
Key features of Chorus
Chorus analyzes emails, meetings, and calls from the source, summarizes them, and then uses that data to bring additional visibility to each call.
It has an AI-driven coaching feature, similar to Gong’s offering, where top sales performers are held up as models to be emulated. The AI attempts to establish what those top performers are doing that makes them hit their targets more consistently, and feeds that info back to SDRs and sellers via an automated coaching function.
All conversations are automatically mapped to your CRM, providing notes that anyone can view. This makes reporting far easier, and sellers no longer need to type in manual notes to run reports on conversations.
All of this reduces ramp time for new hires who can listen in on recorded conversations previously done by top sellers.
What Chorus does well
Chorus integrates with every major CRM and Online Meeting Platform with just a click. It brings AI-driven insight into each contact in the CRM, putting sales-critical information at the fingertips of sellers.
Like Gong, it uses AI to determine what coaching is needed per team member.
Managers can assign scores to calls and give direct feedback to sellers so they know where they went wrong, or what they did right.
As a sales facilitation tool, Chorus does assist in helping sales reps move leads through the sales pipeline.
Bigtincan integrations with conversational intelligence tools
Brainshark integrations with Gong
Our Brainshark Sales Readiness platform has two powerful integrations with Gong:
Gong Recordings Integrated into Courses
This integration lets you take examples of Gong sales conversations and embed them directly within a Brainshark course or attach it as part of a coaching activity. Sellers can easily listen or watch Gong recordings to learn what “good” looks like without ever having to leave the flow of the course.
For example, a course on running a successful discovery conversation can include a Gong recording of your top seller performing discovery with a prospect.
The entire Gong call can be embedded, or you can easily select a snippet of the most important part of the call. When the call is opened in Brainshark, the Gong player will show up directly inside the Brainshark player. Gong also records both audio calls and video calls (Zoom, etc.).
Learn more about this integration.
Gong Insights and KPIs Integrated with Brainshark Scorecards
Brainshark customers can see activity, interaction, and coaching performance from Gong alongside existing sales readiness activities. This helps enablement leaders and sales managers identify the areas where reps and teams need to improve and then apply the correct training to boost the skills or knowledge needed.
Gong's Revenue Intelligence platform gathers customer interactions across phone, web conferencing, and email. Gong evaluates these interactions and brings the data together for AI-driven insights. Gong also integrates with other sales technology platforms like your CRM to add business context to conversations; for example, the stage of the opportunity when the conversation took place.
With this integration, leaders get visibility into how reps and managers are progressing through their training and practice programs and can connect that with how those reps are performing. This lets enablement and sales leaders assign extra training if they are not getting the right results in the field.
Learn more about the Scorecards for Gong integration.
Bigtincan Engagement Hub integrations with Gong
Clearslide Meetings, part of Bigtincan Engagement Hub, were custom-built for sellers, making it possible for us to deliver the very best solution for sellers on the market.
That’s why our integration with Gong automatically sends Clearslide recorded meetings to gong for analysis, saving the need to schedule the meeting, giving sellers back more time to focus on selling activities.
Bigtincan Engagement Hub conversational intelligence capabilities
Bigtincan offers the most comprehensive suite of Sales Enablement solutions and services on the market. Our products cover every aspect of Enablement from content management, to training and closing, and all the way through after-sales coaching. Bigtincan Engagement Hub includes conversational intelligence capabilities that are complementary to Gong, Chorus, and similar solutions.
Main features of Bigtincan Engagement Hub
The Bigtincan Engagement Hub includes our ClearSlide and VoiceVibes products.
Using ClearSlide, sellers are able to build rich buying experiences across every touchpoint whether it's sharing content through personalized microsites or engaging virtual meetings. Clearslide gathers deep engagement insights along the way to help sellers understand their customers' interests and tailor every interaction around them.
ClearSlide offers real-time feedback on prospect engagement. This allows the sellers to take action immediately, during the call. It also provides after-meeting analytics, drilling down to minute details such as who opened a piece of content (e.g., a brochure) that was sent to them via the ClearSlide platform, and who didn’t.
If ClearSlide’s AI determines that a meeting attendee becomes disengaged during the call, it raises a real-time alert to the host who can take action immediately.
ClearSlide also interacts with email platforms like Google’s Gmail and Microsoft Outlook. Engagement insights allow reps to know when to send an email, as well as what content it should contain. Email is tracked so that reps know how the recipients interacted with their message.
ClearSlide’s live meeting capabilities, built from the ground-up to support sales conversations, record meetings, store them and analyzes them. But it goes a step further: ClearSlide also stores attendee names, contact details, and how engaged each participant was with the information that was relayed during the meeting.
ClearSlide records which participants read which documents, and also when they were read.
VoiceVibes overview — what is VoiceVibes?
VoiceVibes is the only conversational intelligence solution that enhances feedback on practice video assignments with AI-powered scores for tones of voice shown to impact how speakers are perceived. When VoiceVibes’s AI determines that a seller is sounding, for example, arrogant or condescending, the salesperson receives immediate feedback through the product.
Key features of VoiceVibes
Coaching remains the most impactful way to positively impact seller behavior. With VoiceVibes, you can enhance this via individual, group, or AI-driven feedback. And if you are taking advantage of peer-level coaching or have sales leaders or dedicated sales coaches, they can be notified and deliver their feedback as well.
Sales managers create assignments for reps to either record themselves or upload a short segment of a recorded sales of them executing a specific task like pitching or objection handling.
So reps don’t have to wait for feedback from reviewers, VoiceVibes analyzes recordings and instantly generates scores and provides suggestions on how to improve. It reports on:
- Pace
- Clarity
- Use of filler words
- Pausing
- 20 positive and negative “vibes” (see outcome D)
- And more
What VoiceVibes does well
VoiceVibes’s unique offering analyzes the tone of the voice, or its “vibe,” to help sellers come across more friendly and approachable. VoiceVibes impacts the most influential motivator in any sale — emotion.
Studies have shown that using VoiceVibes’s metrics and suggestions can increase the chances of a sale by as much as 13 times.
The tool was designed in conjunction with expert linguists and acoustic psychologists. It’s real science that helps drive real sales results.
Final thoughts
Bigtincan customers can derive deep benefits from conversational intelligence tools.
Those that haven’t yet invested can use our solutions to get started with CI capabilities.
Schedule a walkthrough of VoiceVibes or Bigtincan's other conversational intelligence integrations today.
