How managers can use AI to extract insights from sales call transcripts

Sales call transcripts are a goldmine of insights—waiting to be unearthed. 

But, unfortunately, managers don’t have enough time to review transcripts and dig out insights from each conversation. Between planning a sales strategy, coaching reps, and hiring new recruits—they’re spread out thin and cannot carve out time for anything else.

Enter artificial intelligence. AI uses machine learning algorithms and natural language processing (NLP) to analyze transcripts and provide actionable insights into the next steps, coaching, deal risks, buyer sentiment, and a lot more. 

In this blog post, we look at how you can use AI to extract insights from sales call recordings & transcripts. Let's go.

3 ways you can use AI to generate insights from transcripts

1. Extract automated, personalized insights

AI can scrape through each transcript to generate personalized insights, such as key takeaways, outcomes, next steps, action items, and much more. Managers can quickly review calls and get complete context in seconds—rather than listening to call recordings or sifting through endless transcripts.

Using natural language processing (NLP), AI can extract actionable insights into your prospects/customers—their business needs, pain points, current workflows, key decision-makers, and a lot more, so you can customize your sales strategies specific to their needs and use cases.‍

• Detect buyer sentiments

AI can scan transcripts to detect positive and negative sentiments throughout the call. Say, for example, if a prospect mentions they’re impressed with new features of the product, AI will capture that sentiment and mark it as positive. On the contrary, if they mention they’re disappointed or confused, AI will mark that as a negative sentiment.

Other than these surface-level insights, AI can analyze sales calls to capture verbal and physical cues, such as tone, body language, facial expressions, etc. In an event where a prospect expresses discomfort while talking about pricing, AI will capture their body language and emotional cues and mark that as a negative sentiment. 

Sales managers can review this analysis for each call to understand common buyer pain points and objections, what resonates with buyers and what doesn’t, and most importantly, how reps handle such situations to provide targeted feedback.

• Capture and track keywords important to you

AI can identify and track specific keywords or phrases that indicate buyer sentiment, purchasing intent, and overall engagement.

Say, for example, you want to capture every time a prospect mentions a competitor or requests a new feature. AI can analyze your transcripts and capture keywords or phrases related to them. You can also set up alerts, so every time these keywords are mentioned on the call, you’ll proactively get notified via CRM, Slack—or any other channel you use. 

Not only that, you can set up trackers for filler words such as um, just, like basically, etc., to monitor reps’ performance on the call. A higher frequency of filler words usually indicates reps are unable to convey the product’s value or solve customer pain points. This allows you to uncover new coaching opportunities so you can train your reps to improve their overall skills. 

• Discover upsell & cross-sell opportunities

Further to keyword tracking, AI can analyze transcripts and capture upsell and cross-sell opportunities. For example: A customer might mention they’re exploring CRM integrations. AI can identify the relevant keyword and trigger an alert, so you can upsell them to a higher-tiered plan with CRM integration.

Or, in another case, you can ask them to migrate to your CRM platform and offer them a bundle service—increasing your average customer value and ensuring lesser friction (and faster adoption) for customers. 

2. Assess reps’ performance and provide coaching

As a manager, you want to review each call quickly and objectively and provide targeted coaching to reps so they can improve faster. AI helps you extract conversation insights from transcripts—top keywords, questions asked, longest monologues, etc., to assess the quality of the conversation instantly.

You can also track filler words, such as like, basically, um, just, etc., to understand where reps are struggling and create sales enablement or offer 1:1 coaching sessions to help them improve.

Ensure your reps are in a continuous state of learning and provide feedback instantly when they slip up. Use snippets to capture feedback and share it on Slack or any other channel you use. Or you can simply tag them and drop a comment on transcripts, allowing them to understand what they’re doing right or wrong, so they can adjust their sales approach accordingly.

• Identify topic trends & winning sales techniques

AI can analyze transcripts and provide a breakdown of the topics discussed by successful reps. This allows you to capture trends related to topics such as competitors, pricing, feature requests, etc—and understand what’s working and not working in your favor. 

You can capture key moments and share them instantly via Slack or create a repository of best practices, which reps can follow to ensure greater success across conversations.

Or assemble them in a playlist of sorts where you can list the best moments related to different topics, such as objection handling, negotiation, and closing techniques, for instant, asynchronous coaching. You can also onboard new reps faster by tiding them over with the sales enablement, allowing them to learn and absorb faster, rather than shadowing others on live calls.

• Evaluate & score reps’ performance for targeted coaching

The beauty of AI is that it can dig through your transcripts to assess if your reps asked the right questions, stuck to the agenda, and effectively demonstrated the product's value. You can create scorecards with customized questions, and AI will mark ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ depending on whether the question was covered or not.

Or, if that’s too much of a hassle, make use of popular sales methodologies, such as MEDDIC, BANT, and SPICED, that score your reps based on predefined parameters, so you know instantly where your reps did well and where they fell short. This cuts down on your time significantly—as AI auto-scores each call, so you don’t have to do it manually. Besides, you can only look at the lowest-scored calls to identify where your reps are lacking and provide targeted coaching.

Find common behaviors and patterns across sales calls and you can also identify where the entire team needs training and you can design coaching programs that can help everyone improve their efficiency and overall performance. 

3. Gain visibility into deal risks & overall deal health

AI can continuously assess your transcripts to look out for buyer signals and deal risks. Say, for example, you’ve set up trackers for keywords, such as ‘not happy’, ‘disappointed’, and ‘need change’, AI will immediately alert you every time these keywords are mentioned on the call. You can identify at-risk deals and take corrective actions before time.

It can also scan multiple call transcripts together to identify churn alerts. You can then dig deeper into each transcript to understand what’s going wrong and how you can fix it. This may also help you uncover coaching opportunities—and you can see where your reps are struggling and provide instant feedback via comments.

• Understand why you win or lose a deal

In addition to surfacing deal risks, AI scrutinizes call transcripts to provide a win/loss analysis. It tells you exactly why you won or lost the deal, listing all the possible reasons and key factors. 

This analysis allows you to understand common buyer concerns or objections, their exact needs and pain points, competitors they’re evaluating, and more. Based on this, you can make adjustments to your sales strategy and improve your chances of closing more deals.

• Assess competitors’ strategy & why you’re losing out to them

‍Win/loss analysis also allows you to get deeper understanding into which competitors you’re losing out to and why you’re losing out to them. Perhaps it’s because they offer more integrations or overall better features at a cheaper price. You can take this feedback to product/engineering & marketing teams to improve overall product capabilities and refine marketing strategy to position your product/service better than competitors. 

Additionally, you can also look at the reps’ performance during these questions. Were they able to demonstrate the value of the product? Were they able to explicitly explain why your product is better than competitors? Maybe their inability to answer these questions clearly and effectively may have also led to deals slipping through. Identify these opportunities and coach your reps proactively to handle these situations and convert leads more effectively.

How Avoma can help you extract insights from sales call transcripts

‍Avoma records and transcribes sales calls to generate actionable insights from each conversation. By using AI, it can automatically surface key insights on coaching, deal risks, customer needs, pain points, buyer sentiments, and much more—enabling you to act faster on data-driven recommendations rather than manually digging out insights. 

Best part? All your conversation insights are directly delivered to your CRM, Slack, and any other channels you use. No need to switch back and forth between multiple tools. 

Here’s how you can use Avoma to generate insights from sales call transcripts:

1. Topic detection & categorization: Avoma automatically scans your transcripts and generates AI-powered notes that are further categorized into relevant topics, such as customers’ needs, pain points, decision makers involved, feedback, etc. You can simply look at these insights to get the complete context of the call.

2. Sentiment analysis: Avoma can analyze sales call transcripts to detect buyer and reps’ sentiments (positive, negative, or neutral) throughout the call. 

3. Keyword tracking: With Avoma, you can capture and track keywords or phrases across transcripts. You can also set up alerts and get notified via CRM or Slack every time these keywords are mentioned on the call.

4. Competitor analysis: Avoma can scan for competitor mentions and give an instant overview of the most and least mentioned competitors. You get insights into the win-loss rate, the competitors you lose out from, and those you win against. You can also look at how many deals convert from sales calls where prospects mention other competitors. 

5. AI scorecards & coaching: Avoma’s AI coaching assistant analyzes transcripts and auto-scores each conversation based on methodologies such as MEDDIC and BANT. You can also create custom scorecards with questions specific to your business and use cases. Depending on the calls that are scored the lowest, you can prioritize your time and effort into coaching and improving reps’ performances.

6. Deal Intelligence: Avoma can analyze transcripts to surface churn risks and alerts. You can click on the associated keywords or phrases and it will redirect you to the moment in the conversation, making it easier for you to review and get instant context.

Ready to get more out of your sales call transcripts? 

By leveraging AI to analyze call transcripts, you can identify key moments, assess deal risks and churn before time, and provide tailored coaching to the reps.

When your sales reps is armed with these actionable insights, they can spot trends early on, handle objections with ease, and ultimately improve the customer experience. 

If you want to get started with an AI-powered tool that can help you extract these valuable insights, give Avoma a try. Sign up for free or book a demo.