For many ISOs and merchant level salespeople (MLSs) capturing and utilizing sales-call data is a daunting challenge. Imagine being able to analyze every word spoken in field sales interactions. SpearFysh Inc. reported it has developed a web-based sales technology that allows agents to capture real-time sales interactions. It then utilizes speech analytics to mine interactions and produce actionable business intelligence.
Kim Lewis, Chief Operations Officer at SpearFysh, explained how the program works. "You go on your iPad, you capture the conversation, the audio recording as well as the notes," he said. "We index it so you have various ways to provide indexing that you can go back to it when you're reviewing it and efficiently find points. So if I had an hour conversation, I don't have to listen to an hour. I can go to minute 32 where I talked about a particular question."
Research has shown that customers and prospects talk on average 12 times faster than the typical salesperson can take notes, and within 24 hours 65 percent of the important details in a sales call are forgotten. Multiple average weekly field sales calls made by the 8,000 to 10,000 words spoken in a one-hour sales call and the cumulative loss of critical data over time can be significant, SpearFysh noted.
"In your CRM [customer relationship management] system you might have 200 of those words captured," Lewis said. "We're actually providing you a repository back to that entire source of 8,000 to 10,000 words to be used in a multitude of ways. That's the power."
According to SpearFysh, once voice data is uploaded to its speech-to-text platform, the converted text is securely indexed against key performance indicators to help sales managers and other primary stakeholders identify trends and challenges, and reshape field sales behavior. The app synchronizes the audio with tablet notes taken, so that when an agent taps on a specific tablet note or tag the audio replay can instantly locate the corresponding information.
At the enterprise level, managers enjoy greater transparency at each stage of the sales process. They can run queries on a variety of CRM metrics to determine, for example, how many times a competitor's name is mentioned during sales calls or whether MLSs are using key words prescribed for certain campaigns.
"The more I qualify the interaction to those types of standard CRM fields, the more data I have to run analytics against because now I can do more powerful things," Lewis said, adding that he could, for example, tell an MLS, "Do you realize that when you're in a stage two discovery call and you talk more than 50 percent of the time, you have a 30 percent lower close rate than when you talked less than 25 percent of the time?"
According to Lewis, after implementing SpearFysh in one of its regional offices, one client reported a 200 percent increase in sales in that region compared with regions without the program. "They attributed a significant amount of that to holding people accountable to the conversation because the salespeople knew they were going to be reviewed by their manager from a training opportunity perspective to get better," he said.
In addition to offering basic CRM through its own platform, the program has been certified for integration with SalesForce CRM synchronization. SpearFysh is designed to integrate with most leading CRMs to pull data for analytics and then push the data, such as voice data that has been converted to text, back to CRM systems.
The software-as-a-service is available to ISOs and MLSs on a per-user license basis. While smaller clients are welcome, larger organizations are SpearFysh's primary target. "If you use this for a company of 10 or less, you're never really sure if it was the person or the technology that made the difference," Lewis said. "But if you get over 30, statistical analysis starts to smooth all that out [and can] provide statistically solid trends. Because of the heavy analytics, we want to drive on the back-end; that's why we're targeting larger organizations."
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