Salesloft on Salesloft: How we use conversation intelligence to master the sales process for Managers

And I think it says waiting for live stream.

So just wanted to, talk about what we're here to speak about today, which is, you know, how we use conversation intelligence to go over and and kinda master the sales process as a management and leadership group.

And, you probably wanna know who we are.

So my name is David Vertin. I am the VP of sales and business development here at SalesLoft, and what that means is I lead our SDR and BDR organizations, here at SalesLoft.

Prior to joining SalesLoft, I led the SDR BDR function at another business called Bonterra, which was a SalesLoft customer.

And prior to that, I was involved in sales strategy, sales ops, sales enablement, and XDRs and managed AEs. So have had a variety of different sales roles in the past nine years or so in SaaS, and joined here by Dana. And, Dana, if you, you know, wanna introduce yourself.

Yeah.

Everyone. My name is Dana Lark. Fun fact, I actually report directly to David. So this is, like, you all are joining a one on one, basically. This is awesome.

I have been at SalesLoft for just over five years.

Today, I am a senior manager of business development.

I actually started at SalesLoft as a BDR myself where I used conversation intelligence every single day when I would start my days. I'd listen to the calls of top performers.

I'd quickly write down all their talk tracks.

I moved into a role after that one as a value engineer where I would use conversation intelligence to get up to speed on some of our enterprise customers.

And then, for the last two and a half years, have been leading a BDR team and have been in conversation intelligence as a manager, which is I know what you all are excited to to hear about today, how we use SalesLoft or conversation intelligence internally at SalesLoft.

So, excited to dig into that, and David's gonna run through what your takeaways will be for today.

Yeah. So I I think the goal here is for us to ensure, you know, we're learning new techniques to to leverage a tool like CI to identify moments that we can coach to, discover how we can utilize AI driven analysis, to drive some of those areas of improvement, and ensure that we're, you know, driving performance with actionable insights, to our team so we can just continuously refine our sales approach there as well.

Absolutely. We hope you take so much from this. David and I were were really intentional in the the preparation of this call, so, these three points and so much more.

And throughout the time that we'll be covering those specific topics, Mimi will actually be manning the chat. So you can send your questions directly to that, chat function on the right hand of your screen, and we will have dedicated time at the end of this to jump into some q and a.

But without further ado Yes.

Thanks, Dana. And I think just to talk about the evolution of of CI, you know, some of us are are new to sales. Some of us are new to SaaS.

You know, coming from, field sales originally, you know, the the CI was, hey. I drive my boss around in my car when I was visiting customers.

But moving into SaaS and moving into a place where we have an office, you know, it it started off as if I was when I was onboarding in a new organization, I needed to conference call my manager into these calls. Or if we had a new hire that was starting, they would sit right next to you to shadow some of those calls. Eventually, we got to the point where we could download call recordings from, you know, our our phone provider.

And then finally, we got to the point where we had, you know, cloud based software where we could listen to those calls.

And now it's to the point where, you know, obviously, we have trackers.

Obviously, there's there's ways for us to mark things up in calls or score them. But the evolution of conversation intelligence has made onboarding to an organization that much more effective and speed to value. And then at the same time, it's just enabled a lot of our leaders to do a better job coaching on the right behaviors and the things that we wanna focus on, which we'll talk more about today.

Absolutely.

Thank you. Thank you for that.

You know, when you are leveraging conversation intelligence in your day to day and you have committed as a leader to foster that coaching coaching culture, there's three things that, I was thinking about that you wanna keep in mind.

So defining your cadence, and I'm not talking about the the SalesLoft cadence here, but your cadence and your commitment to reviewing calls.

Managers do not have the bandwidth nor do I want to review every single call that every one of my reps makes or has.

The review process is also rep by rep.

So I interact with conversation intelligence and coaching calls much differently with a rep who is in onboarding or is ramping than someone who is tenured and perhaps internally interviewing for that next role.

So don't be afraid to adjust your usage of conversation intelligence based off of the type and tenure of your team, and also your own bandwidth.

I have certain reps like a a ramping rep would surface, and we would review one call a day versus some of my more tenured reps were reviewing maybe one to three calls a week, which brings us to our next point. Right? Don't overcommit as as leaders or or really, anybody. If you say you're gonna do something, you wanna ensure that you follow through with it.

And call review is a time that I have found I have to carve out intentionally for myself. Right? I can't do it in between, a few different calls that I have lined up. I need to carve that time out intentionally to review.

This has made it much faster and more effective for me to do those those review blocks, But it's much easier to ramp up in your review commitment than it would be to overcommit and have to have to pull back from that. So just depending on the type of team you manage, the calls that your reps are making could range anywhere from one minute to one hour. They could be all brand new, ramping early in their career. They could be more tenured.

So just keep that in mind as you're thinking about the commitments that you have with your with your review process.

And then rules of the road here. So call review is not a one way street, and I would be willing to bet that most reps don't listen to the call that they've sent in to be reviewed. And I will say that because I was guilty of that myself.

And I encourage reps to proactively score their calls in the scorecard feature of conversation intelligence prior to having a sit down and review that call together. So that when we come to that conversation, and we'll touch on scorecards a little bit, further in this call, but it comes to that conversation ensuring that they've actually taken the time to listen back to the call. And just to tell on myself a little bit here and and earn my seat in this conversation for sure, and that, you know, I and that, you know, I would very hesitantly even send over to my manager for call review. When I sat down and actually listened to them, they were never as bad as I thought. Right?

And, ironically, the calls that I thought, man, enablement is gonna make a playbook out of this call. They're gonna use these talk tracks. This is the best call that's that's ever happened.

Funny enough, those calls had no shortage of coaching opportunities. And so listening and self assessing my own calls, would have helped me a ton a few years ago, and definitely is helping the reps that I have today.

And scorecards is a part of that. But, you know, self assessment, feedback, all of that is a gift. So, you know, don't let them rob themselves of that gift of of listening back to their own calls.

And, we are going to swiftly jump into how CI actually works for managers. So one of the first things that comes up here and that comes to mind for me is admin hygiene.

So, organization hygiene, you'll see this, come up as, it's been very top of mind as I've kind of, moved through a few iterations around the sun, at SalesLoft.

And if you filter your settings and your view proactively, it will help so much with the time that you spend reviewing versus actually looking for calls. So I'm gonna jump over to this slide here. But when you click con conversations, this is the view that pulls up for you. This is from our demo instance, but you all, I'm sure, have a similar view here.

And you'll see that you can filter by owner, by even specific account, by the participant. You can filter by your entire team.

And fun fact, you can even filter by duration.

So why is this important? You can, after you edit these filters, save that specific view. And as you have committed to the cadence in which you're gonna be reviewing calls, and we'll get talk a little bit more about how and when reps send you calls versus you self select calls yourself, but this helps that selection process so much.

Some of my outbound reps, they are having cold outbound calls, and they're also running scheduled discovery calls. So for a week, I might only wanna listen to calls that are a duration of seven to eighteen minutes because I know that those are gonna qualify as a scheduled discovery call. And I can quickly jump into a view here, when I'm ready and wanna dig into some of those calls.

And going back to that cadence that you have on the review process, again, on a rep by rep basis, to remove the selection bias, so to speak.

I like to mix it up, and I'm sure some of you, actually have some great ideas for how to approach this, and I'd love to hear it. But one of the things that I do is one week, I'll say to to my rep or or a specific rep, send me the call that you are most proudest of. Like, that happened in the last fourteen days you're really proud of.

You fell on a high after you got off that call. I'd love to sit down and review that call together.

The next week, maybe send me a crash and burn, a call that you feel did not go your way, and has no shortage of room for improvement. And then the third week, I'll go in and self select a call at random, and then we'll start that process over again. But those are just a few different ways and ideas in which you can approach the calls that you're gonna review for that week.

You might be coaching on a specific talk track, so send me a call in which you've used this specific value of prop. Send me a call in which you felt you overcame this specific objection. Those are all different ways to, to review calls.

And, David.

Yeah.

So, also, you know, talking with how we can use conversation intelligence, to get up to speed quickly with our teams, I think, you know, one thing we all know is the only thing constant with sales is is change. So you always have new members joining your team. You always have new managers that hopefully are getting promoted off of your team or into another role that they might need to train up and and listen to top performers calls.

So utilizing a tool like Conversation Intelligence, we can put together playlists specifically of top performers' calls where we can ensure that we're listening to those on a regular basis as a part of onboarding.

Also, sometimes it's a really good opportunity to teach the reps how to utilize scorecards by having these new hires score calls of some of the top performers so that they can understand that. And Dana will touch on that a little bit.

But at the same time, you know, talking about all that change, a lot of times, you know, what what happens is, for instance, on our team, we might have promoted an enterprise development rep to the AE role last quarter.

And we have a new enterprise development rep coming on and taking over that territory.

It's really important that we get that, rep up to speed as quick as possible.

And one way to do that is by listening to CI calls of, hey. Where did this last call or touch point that Joe Blow, had with this prospect leave off?

At the same time, closed loss accounts are usually one of your highest converting in terms of opportunities.

Better understanding, hey.

Susie had a call with with Joe Blow, last quarter, and she told him why we lost that account, and it was x y z reason. We can use that information to personalize some of our outreach. We try and reengage those accounts.

As well, you know, with the evolution of CI, there's a lot more information that you can get without even listening to the call specifically.

I can better understand, hey. Here's just a general synopsis or summary of the call.

I can also understand, hey. Here are some specific key moments, within that call. If I'm a leader and I need to dive into, hey. We've just launched this new product feature. I wanna see how the team's speaking about it or, hey. You know, we're coming up against this competitor a lot more, and our win rates are not necessarily where we want them to be. This is really something I need to dig in to see what's being said on those calls.

So, you know, with the evolution of CI, it's it's helped us just speed up that process. And now we're to the point where, you know, in that handoff process for a BDR to an AE, when the AE is prepping for that next call, they can also just go in. Obviously, they've got some some great notes from their their BDR there, but they also can go in and they can just listen to the general, call or take a look at the summary and action items so that they can prep for that call in a timely fashion as well.

In general, what I've seen is best practice for talk time is really, important to take a look at as well.

You know, in my opinion, it should be sixty percent of the prospect talking and about forty percent of the similar. Now it's it's it's always gonna vary a little bit, but that's something that you can take a look at and see what your top performing reps are doing and what's their ratio of talk time to the prospect as well.

So yeah.

Awesome. Yep. Thanks, David. And, I wish I could see you all because I'd love to know by show of hands who has jumped into the scorecard functionality of conversation intelligence yet.

But, alas, we'll we'll save that for for q and a perhaps.

The scorecards to me are one of the modus most exciting new releases from our product team, particularly in the the conversation intelligence suite.

Use the scorecard to your advantage. If you are a leader here, the scorecards for me have helped me get really granular and stay really organized around the feedback process.

I actually met with our onboarding and enablement team. And when they rolled out this feature to the managers, they enabled us and enrolled us in a scoring model that we then were able to take to our reps prior to scoring any calls. So if this feature is new to you or something that you haven't used or leveraged yet, I highly encourage you to take a look at the evaluation criteria that our enablement team built for us internally to enroll and get buy in and understand what that one through five star scoring means. So scorecards again and I'm actually just gonna bump back because there's a lot on that slide.

The scorecards, in addition to, you know, giving it a one through five scoring, they proactively rate and score with AI ahead of you listening to the call. So you can use the AI assist to help gauge where and in which areas, have the most opportunity or the or the largest skill skill gap in the call before you even press play, which I think is awesome. It will immediately time stamps important areas. It will mark yes or no if open ended questions existed, if the rep, got a good understanding of the buying process from the the customer or prospect.

And the best part about it is scorecards are completely customizable.

So, internally, every single function that is customer facing has their own scorecard built out for them and their specific team. So the customer success team is not gonna use the XDR scorecard framework, but they do have one of their own that they they use and they leverage, and it has really helped expand that culture of coaching to every single facet of our organization.

So I love that you can iterate and make sure that you and your enablement team are really granular about the specific areas in each call you wanna coach on time after time after time. This has personally helped me because, you know, there can be some biased or a specific conversation happening that week that's top of mind for me when I hop into a call, and the scorecard brings it back to what's most important. It brings it back to the principles that we've aligned on as an organization and allows our coaching conversation to remain there. Of course, there's gonna be some additional conversation outside of that, but it's really helped me get organized. And, you know, I'm all about data hygiene and and organization this year. So, again, bouncing back to this, this is our enablement scorecard for our evaluation criteria. This is only indicative of that one through five scoring that you'll see at the very bottom of an overall score in our scorecards.

You will also see the option to do one through five on any question that you put in yourself on the scorecard as you're building it out.

Super important for someone like me to understand when I am sitting down with a rep and scoring them on a scale of one through five, is have that conversation upfront about what a one mean and what a five means.

A five does not mean that the rep did the action that was expected. A five would mean that we are, you know, hallmarking this call. It's going in the hall of fame, and, again, it's informing our future future talk tracks and future strategies as an organization.

Most calls will probably be at a three. Probably forty to fifty percent of of my calls end at a three. The two and the ones are awesome because it's an area for improvement. And, again, two meaning that there are deficiencies in the process, but there is still potential there. There's or not always lost in the call. So I think that one of the biggest things that helps with leveraging scorecards in your team and in your one on one is to get buy in from the organization level, from the leadership level, and from the rep level on what the scoring criteria internally as well.

And I just wanted to reiterate one, you know, one point on the scorecards that Dana brought up. One thing I've noticed historically is sometimes there's gonna be a difference in the average that the the reps score themselves versus the manager versus myself, or there's gonna be difference in how your managers score those calls as well.

So when you see that, that's a really good opportunity to get your team together, to ensure that you're all on the same page.

And the biggest discrepancy is usually between the rep scoring their own call and the manager.

But sometimes you do have reps that are really self aware, and I think that's great.

But those scorecards, I think, just really help you hit home on on what's important.

And I'd also encourage you as well with scorecards, make sure you're not trying to score too many things. There's always things that we can do better, but each call, there only should be so many categories that we're trying to score.

But onto, just, you know, quantifying anecdotes here.

So being in sales, I think one thing we're great at doing is providing anecdotal feedback to marketing or the product team on what we need, when we need it.

And I'll use a specific example.

One of our other managers, Travis, was and I were on a one on one on Monday. He provided some anecdotal feedback that we're hearing about a need for a specific feature on a lot of our inbound calls in EMEA.

And, you know, it's it's also something that I've been talking to my boss, our CRO, Mark, about, and it's really just timely feedback. But at the same time, I can't go to Mark and say, hey. By the way, this is coming up on a bunch of our calls without providing him specifics on, hey. When is it being said? How How many times is it being said?

And, you know, what's the result of some of those calls?

So when that came up, I went into CI, put together a filter to see the calls that are that is coming up on.

Also built a tracker, where I could ensure that I'm I'm tracking how many times going forward that this is coming up on calls and see if it's going up or going going down.

And then at the same time as well so that that's feedback that we can share with the product team, and that's feedback that we can share with the marketing team. And they can really determine, hey. Is it worth the investment dollars to make some changes to our product?

Hey. Is it really worth the investment dollars to ensure we get more of this type of inbound lead or pullback resources on type on this type of inbound lead where we're seeing low conversions.

So with conversation intelligence, it takes a lot of that anecdotal feedback that historically we're so great at giving and put some numbers behind it. And that's what's really important when we're, you know, communicating with other departments in the company here as well.

Another example as well, we've rolled out, I think we had our our spring release of product features. The enablement team wants to better understand, hey. Who's talking about this on the phone?

How many times are they talking about it? What do those calls look like? So we have a tracker built for that where we can see how many times it's coming up in some of our calls and if we need to provide more enablement resources to ensure it hits home with the rest of the team.

So big evolution from where it was, years and years ago.

Absolutely.

Thanks, David.

So kind of circling the wagons here, big takeaways, commit to a process. Right?

Try not to overcommit.

Align with your team on how you're scoring. Right? Align with your team on the scorecard questions and criteria.

All of this is completely customizable. It's not one size fits all, and I think that's really the beauty of it. And then tailor SalesLoft to fit your needs. So everything from playlists to trackers to dashboards to, you know, your coaching view, your conversations view.

All of that can be tailored. I'm also happy at any time. I love connecting with other peers in the industry. So, you know, I have plenty of times leveraged conversations with peers to understand, you know, how they are, you know, preparing for call reviews, making their coaching sessions one percent one percent better.

And, yeah, those are the the three big takeaways from here. And now I'd love to to open it up to q and a.

Alright. Looks like Sarah took care, we took care of your question there.

But, yeah, you know, to Dana's point, any questions that we can answer, whether it's about conversation intelligence, whether it's about SalesLoft, talking about BDRs or sales strategy, you know, we're happy to answer them as well.

Well, maybe while we're waiting for some questions to come through, David, you could talk a little bit about, the admin certification.

Yeah.

So as someone who has been a SalesLoft customer previously, and I've actually implemented and been the admin of of SalesLoft at two previous companies, one thing that I wanted to do is ensure that I get that SalesLoft admin certification.

So it's a program that has evolved over the past, I think three months. We released a new admin certification course.

So I'd encourage all of you, you know, if if you are planning on enablement for your team or you're heavily involved in that admin experience for your team or even if you're just a frontline leader, take that admin certification there as well.

It's something that's gonna be really valuable to you.

Alright. Stephanie, big organizational shift for us. How do we launch this to our sales team without it feeling too big, brother? That's a good question. So I personally feel like the most important thing you do is train the trainer.

So the first thing I've done in the past when rolling out new capabilities or a new tech stack is, one, let's get our management team together first, better understand how are we going to utilize a tool like this.

How are we gonna put together that cadence of usage of that tool?

So understanding from the management perspective. And then second piece is, hey. Let's grab some of our ICs that do a really good job providing feedback that's constructive, and let's talk that through with them to better understand how they would use a certain tool like that. So when we launched the broader team, we have some internal advocates that are on the front lines.

And, also, I'd say, you know, spiffs usually help as well when you're rolling out new capabilities of, hey. Who has the best discovery call?

Who, had the highest scored call for the month. So I think when you ensure that you're doing your due diligence before you roll out a feature, getting buy in from the team, and and also just how you phrase rolling this out, as something to enable and help support the team, that's gonna be, really important.

Yeah. And every, I don't know a rep that doesn't love to get shouted out for executing on a strategy behavior talk track. And so, I think one thing that's really important early on is just having a system and a cadence in place for a review process of great examples of behaviors you'd love to see the team run with. Right? That, old saying praise in public and, you know, maybe coach or criticize in private, like, that applies here one hundred percent.

Those one on one conversations are an opportunity for growth. Right? We're all here because we wanna grow. We wanna be one percent better. And, in the meantime, let's shout out the conversations that we're hearing that are excellent and great. Mhmm.

But I do understand, the the organizational shift, and that was such a great question to to throw out.

I see we have a couple of more. Is there any type of conversation intelligence for voice mails?

I am not a hundred percent sure. I might, have Mimi jump into, the knowledge base for on that one. Mhmm. We have calls that are already been recorded from this is from James. Can we create a score card now and apply that new custom scorecard to past calls as well?

I think the answer to that one is I I believe you can do that, where you can apply it to past calls that you have.

And, let me see here.

Is the AI scoring trained internally of SalesLoft, or does it continually train based on the user teams using SalesLoft?

That is a good question that I don't know the answer to.

So I think we can do a fast follow with that, for you, Cody, and and answer that question for you.

Absolutely.

From Sarah, do you ever see SalesLoft having call recordings for internal discussions for coaching internally? AKA mock sales pitches would be awesome to have AI recordings on for training purposes.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. The short answer would be yes.

We definitely have some of our internal calls, recorded.

Although, I think sometimes people don't wanna record internal calls. There's specific settings that you can set on the back end for that.

But definitely, I think mock sales pitches, I think, is a great use case.

I used to do discovery call certifications for new hires, recording those. So I think there's there's a lot of opportunity to have, I think, internal calls, and you can put together a specific playlist for that as well.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

One of the I I think you've made a a good call out around playlist, especially for ramping and onboarding and being able to jump in and have self selected plays from leadership or from enablement that are tried and true, and you could listen to them know knowing that those are the behaviors, talk tracks that the the organization is encouraging.

But I love the, call out around mock sales calls and sales pitches.

We do a little bit of that internally ourselves as well.

And then, Cody, I I saw another one of your questions on, you know, if if someone calls in and it goes to voice mail, does that still come through, or is it directed to voice mail?

I believe that would not be a recorded call in CI.

I believe, yeah, that would not be a recorded call in CI.

So many great questions. What a fun crew. So Cody says, how does conversation intelligence work with one side of recordings? Like, calls that go into California where it will only record the user.

I run into this a lot. So I manage a team that, touches all of North America and sometimes, the globe. So, there are often times in which the calls that we're sitting down to to coach a review are one-sided.

Now the one thing that I I say to that is it's a good thing. You know? I'm not having to coach the prospect. Right? I'm only there to to coach the rep side of the conversation.

And so while it does, I think, help when you get into that one on one to have the rep fill a couple of gaps, One of the things that I think is just a best practice, whether your calls are one-sided or two sided, is to repeat back in your conversation what you just heard said. So you and I'm not saying you have to repeat every single thing back on the conversation, but having some color in your answers on what the prospect just shared will not only inform and make the prospect feel felt, but will also inform your coaching conversations and one on ones because your, you know, the manager can hear the other side of that call without actually hearing the prospect.

Now I'll be the first to admit that there are some gaps to being able to really get into the weeds around tonality and pacing when you can't hear the other side of a call. Mhmm. But it's I use, one-sided call recordings and and one on ones all the time.

Yeah. You're welcome.

Keep them coming. David, you got any jokes? Just kidding.

I I don't. None nothing for a webinar.

Okay.

Well, this has been wonderful. If we don't have anything else, thank you all so much.

Please connect with us on LinkedIn. Would love to, continue the conversation. And, yeah. Mimi, are we good to go?

Oh, good to go. Oh, just kidding.

Is there a data or activity recap for all calls during a week or a month?

Yes.

Absolutely.

So coaching, which comes with all, packages in our our platform, gives you a rep view and a team view of all inputs that you're currently measuring, and you can actually set goals. So this is outside of conversation intelligence, but it's in my second favorite part, which is coaching.

And that was built for managers. I wanna say by managers, but we didn't build it.

But it is definitely a great place to hop into to get that holistic view of your team.

Alright. Well, I think that is the last question unless we see another one pop back up.

Thank you everybody for attending today.

Really appreciate it. And just to reiterate what Dana said too, if if anybody has questions they wanna ask offline, don't hesitate to reach out. We always love talking shop.

Awesome. Thanks.