Every sales leader knows that the right behaviors are the path to good results. But, behaviors don’t show up on any of their performance dashboards. Revenue, conversion rate, and customer satisfaction are on there, but those numbers don’t tell leaders what their team is, or is not, doing.
We are starting to see a shift, though.
As sales organizations begin using AI conversation recording and analytics (for contact centers and in-person conversations), they can gain a clear picture of what their sellers are doing and saying in real time. The tools are making it possible to measure behaviors.
It Takes More Than the Tool
Conversational AI tools can do a lot, but they can’t do everything. For example, they can listen to a conversation and identify where salespeople are or are not saying certain things. It can flag their opening, their discovery questions, and how they position value.
What would change if a manager knew exactly which behaviors improved before the sales numbers moved? AI conversation recording gives organizations the ability to shift their culture away from one-off number tracking and toward a more sustainable focus on the actual behaviors salespeople are delivering, conversation by conversation, day in and day out.
With these tools, companies can get back to the fundamental building blocks of sales success, the individual actions and behaviors that make up a good customer interaction. Behaviors from these captured conversations get tracked and over time behavior trends will emerge.
However, the tool alone doesn’t create measurement. It creates the data that then takes an effective and structured coaching schedule to turn analytics into meaningful behavior change.
Defined Coaching & Measurable Behavior
There is still important work for sales leaders and frontline managers to do. Before AI can measure anything meaningful, organizations have to decide which selling behaviors actually matter. What does a great customer conversation look like? Which questions should every salesperson ask? How should they uncover customer needs? When should they introduce value instead of price?
Those standards don’t come from the technology. Leadership needs to define those standards and set the tool up to track them.
Once those expectations are defined, organizations can begin tracking improvement over time. Even more importantly, they can start to correlate the adjustments to sales results. That correlation has been missing for most sales organizations. It’s one thing to see a salesperson’s numbers improve but it is another to pinpoint what changed inside the customer conversation to produce those results.
This is where coaching is critical. Managers can point to specific conversations, identify the behaviors that were present or absent, and track whether those behaviors improve over time. Coaching becomes more focused, more consistent, and far less subjective.
Most importantly, organizations can begin connecting those behavior changes to business outcomes. If salespeople who consistently ask more discovery questions also produce higher close rates or larger average sales, leaders have tangible evidence that their coaching is working. They’re no longer hoping better conversations lead to better results because they can see the relationship develop over time.
Conversation analytics transform into a true performance improvement system. Following the equation of the tool’s visibility along with effective coaching, a roadmap for continuous improvement is revealed.
Isolate What Drives Sales Performance
With the right tools and a proper coaching structure organizations can be more precise in pinpointing which selling actions drive results. The technology provides the visibility while the coaching provides the direction, and together sales leaders are granted their wish of tying behaviors to the results.
