Zoom on Zoom: How our sales teams work smarter with AI-powered conversation intelligence

As a sales leader, you don’t have room in your schedule to be a part of every big deal — or time to waste on deals that aren’t close to completion. Your managers don’t have the time to coach every AE. And you need insight into what’s really happening with deals in every stage of the sales process. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish it all.

Here at Zoom, our sales teams had those same problems. Change came when we started using our own product, Zoom Revenue Accelerator: conversation intelligence technology for sales teams. It uses artificial intelligence to analyze customer conversations and provide helpful summaries and powerful metrics on the content and delivery of reps’ calls.

“If you look into the conversations we have every day, there is a treasure trove of insights,” said Rob Greene, head of commercial acquisition sales at Zoom. “Now, we can easily access those insights at scale.” 

Check out three ways our sales teams used Zoom Revenue Accelerator to improve coaching, gain a better understanding of the competition, and get richer details on deals — and learn how it can help your sales org, too.

Part of a manager’s job is supporting their reports and helping them to improve through targeted feedback. However, the only real coaching that was happening was on sales calls that managers were able to attend.

Even when sales meetings were recorded, reviewing those recordings took time. 

“Managers don’t have the time to sift through the whole recording to understand what the sentiment was for every call,” said Christine Hanks, a senior account executive. “I had to tell my manager how I thought the call went, but that was my personal opinion. As a salesperson, it can be difficult to distinguish between how I wanted the call to go versus how the customer actually felt.”

Conversation analytics transformed how we coach

Zoom Revenue Accelerator gave our sales teams much more than call recordings — it provided call summaries so managers could see at a glance what was discussed and the next steps that were being taken. It called out when a rep asked an engaging question or mentioned a Zoom product. It gave metrics on how quickly reps were talking and — importantly — how often they were using their time to listen. 

“If you spend 80% of your time in a sales call talking versus asking really good questions and exploring deeper with the customer, you're going to be less effective. These are really easy metrics for managers to see at a glance on a report.”

Rob Greene, head of commercial acquisition sales

“It can be very eye-opening,” Christine said. “Having the feedback supported by analytics makes it easier to consume, and that just leads to faster and better training, opportunities for improvement — it takes the coaching aspect to a completely different level.” 

Our enablement team also created playlists so our sales team and new hires could learn from their peers.

“There’s a difference between classroom training and real-life sales calls, where they’re handling objections and asking great closing questions,” Rob said. “It’s great to have that playlist capability to create libraries for every step of the sales cycle so we can say, ‘Here’s a great discovery call. Here are great calls for stage three, stage four, stage five, and so on.’”

Our customer relationship management (CRM) platform allowed reps to track the competitors they were up against, but our competitive intelligence felt incomplete. “We were very much driven by whatever data was in our CRM, but it really only allowed you to select one competitor in most cases,” Rob said. That limited our sales team’s understanding of the true competitive landscape.

Competitive insights changed our enablement strategy

Zoom Revenue Accelerator allowed us to track mentions of competitors in every sales call. But it didn’t just flag mentions, it let us drill down into how often a particular competitor was mentioned in deals that were won or lost, and provided actual snippets from the call so we could see mentions in context. 

“So we're seeing more clearly what's actually happening in calls as opposed to only the final result on the closed won or lost deal,” Rob said.

Once we got greater visibility into what prospects were actually saying about our competitors with Zoom Revenue Accelerator, it changed everything from our training content to our strategy. Our sales teams started training on different competitors and role playing in team meetings so reps felt better prepared. 

With the ability to see mentions over a period of time, the teams were able to adapt more quickly to the evolving competitive landscape. 

“If I’m going against a competitor, I can search Zoom Revenue Accelerator for recordings that mention that company and see how other reps handled it. I can find the best conversations and most successful stories we’ve had and learn from those clips to prepare for my conversation.”

Derek Simons, account executive

Our sales leaders struggled with not having enough time to focus on every deal and not enough visibility to know which were the biggest ones. They booked key deal reviews with reps, who had to take time away from selling to prepare, and even then, leaders didn’t always walk away with the clearest picture of where the deal was in the sales process. 

“It was an inefficient way to understand what was happening because it took too long — and it could also be inaccurate,” Rob admitted.

Rob noted that sales leaders want to be brought in at the right time to have the biggest impact. Zoom Revenue Accelerator helped them do that.

Sales insights uncovered new opportunities

With Zoom Revenue Accelerator, sales leaders could get deeper insights into their pipeline than what was being reported in reps’ notes. Zoom Revenue Accelerator's AI-generated conversation summaries and next steps gave leaders an inside look at every call. 

“Now our leaders can see which questions the customers were asking, how we responded to them, which competitor names were mentioned, and what their timeline is,” Rob said. 

With improved revenue intelligence, reps were able to get executive-level help on the right deals faster. Having that visibility into the conversation also helped surface new opportunities. 

“If I’m talking to a company and they mention their competitors or a problem they’re having, my sales leader might recognize in the analysis that there’s a bigger opportunity to tie in different products than what we had originally discussed,” Derek said.

“My manager is incredible at asking challenging questions that I maybe didn’t think about and that can potentially uncover additional opportunities if he’s involved at the right stage. Unless we ask those good questions early on, we may not get those same opportunities twice.”

Christine Hanks, senior account executive

Zoom Revenue Accelerator helped our sales teams work smarter, not harder. Account executives were able to get more direct feedback from their managers and more impactful support from sales leaders on deals that mattered. 

Leaders found that when Zoom Revenue Accelerator was able to surface the most important insights from their teams’ conversations, it gave them a deeper understanding of deal opportunities, competitors, and how reps could improve. 

Want to learn more about conversation intelligence technology for sales? Watch our introductory webinar, part of our revenue acceleration series, to see how conversational AI can help your sales team succeed.