Identify Call Signals with Proper Listening - Gurupandian Chandrasekaran - Revenue Today - Episode # 015
22 Sept 2022 · 9 min
Gurupandian Chandrasekaran explains how to spot what customers really want during calls by listening for universal cues like pauses and talk-time imbalances, plus team-specific signals like pricing language for sales or issue-resolution talk for support. Transcripts alone don't work; you need AI tools that surface alerts and learn new patterns automatically.
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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.
Chris, the next question, how do you differentiate customer success call signals from all call sales signals? Actually, Chris, that's a good question because like if you use, if your teams, like let's say success team, sales team, support team, all use the same thing, how are you differentiating? I think the differentiation comes in the nature of the call, which is kind of a function of the team itself. And also what you want each call to adhere to. So as I said earlier, there are some human signals which are consistent in all calls, like across industries, across regions. You will know a pause means something, right? If somebody is talking more than the other person, you know that's a problem. So these are some things that you can codify, but it's kind of generic across any call. These are common basic traits. There are some which are dependent on an industry. Like for example, like, you know, an edtech call or a B2B SaaS, a logistics company, all them will have different calls at different key phrases, different mentions. Now even within that, right, let's say a sales call will talk more about pricing, will talk more about demos, the competitor names, they'll talk about feature requests, right? These you can find some patterns, you can have intent signals built on that and you can learn. Whereas a success call will be a little bit more about vision, QBRs. We can identify those phrases. Okay, what is your plan for the next 3 months? What is your plan for the next 6 months? Are you using your product properly? Why is the usage drop? This will never be in a sales call. A support call kind of will have a little bit overlap with the success call, but it will be more about issue resolution. It'll be about I'm facing this problem currently. Help me with that. You can codify it. You can codify some of these engines, but the rest, the IQ engine will help you build it and it'll keep throwing up. That's the beauty of an engine like this is because the tool is also helping you listen. It'll tell you, hey, in the last month, 40% of calls had this particular keyword, which is something which you have not considered. You have to consider it now. You have to be like, okay, it makes sense. And anyway, you will have the team set up, so it will start grouping those calls in a particular behavior to track. And that's why you can differentiate. So some will be inputs from the company and the team and the management, some will be inputs from the tool itself, so you can differentiate them. So I think those are very good questions by Jameel and Chris. Definitely very interesting because, you know, you have to think about listening as a very key thing that you have to make part of your GTM engine. You have to build that muscle. And that muscle is crucial because it kind of provides context to all teams, whether you are in sales, success, support, marketing, it doesn't matter. It is a customer-facing team. That's why it's important. So Alice has raised another question is, what is the easiest way to implement listening today? I think the easiest way is to plug a tool which Now this is where I think a lot of people get confused. They say, okay, I'm going to just get a tool to transcribe. That's only adding more to your problem because you want to be efficient in this. You don't want to like, you know, okay, you've recorded all calls, you've transcribed them. What are you going to do with that, right? Are you going to sit and read like 1,000 calls data? You can't. It's not going to happen. And you would— and that's kind of like, you know, moving the problem from listening 1,000 calls to reading 1,000 calls. It's not going to help. So you need a tool which will transcribe, which will condense it, which will give you alerts, which will— when it will be very flexible so that you can give signals and say, hey, listen, I think these are the 5 phrases that I would want to see if it has occurred. If it's not occurred, it's a problem for my sales calls. That is a way to track it. Then we can build on it. We can build on moment sentiment. You can talk about what are the most common things And you can keep tracking it. And that's— you need— that's the starting point. That's the baseline. And that's where a tool like JustCall IQ helps you because you can plug it in. You need a tool which is plug and play. You plug it in, you listen to 1,000 calls, 500 calls, automatically insights starts coming out on the other side and actionable insights. You don't want a tool which tells you, okay, you made 1,000 calls, 1,000 calls all were 3 minutes to 4 minutes in length. Great. I mean, what are you going to do with that insight, right? It's a stupid insight. You need actionable insight which will improve every call. If you feed 100 calls, it tells you these 100 calls, whatever phrases you mentioned, 68% of calls had them, 32% didn't have them. So you know immediately, like, 1 in every 3 calls that happens next will not have those. So you have to improve them. So that's how you have to look for it. And that's the baseline. Don't go into getting a transcription tool. Don't go into getting a tool which will give you like, you know, and ask yourself, what is the insight that you're giving me that I can apply in the very next call? And the tool should do the heavy lifting with AI. And that's the baseline. Don't go anything below that. So I think, you know, we are running out of time, but I think we have maybe time for one question if somebody has. But this has been a good session to talk about, like, you know, why listening is an important part. So you should stay tuned for our next chapters where we're going to talk about the other chapters. We have listening, we have learning, we have, you know, talking to customers where they are, how to transform your team into a super team. These are the tools because this is how your go-to-market motion is going to work. Because for startups today, whether you're a founder, one person, or whether you have a 5 people, 100 people sales team, your whole sales marketing growth success motions are becoming very tight. So you have to make the knowledge permeate all departments. They should all have context. And that's a very, very key piece I want you to have before you sign off. Yeah, it's pretty late, definitely. But I'm happy to— okay, at least I have a question. And what's your best advice for companies today if they can do one thing? See, I think this, since this chapter is about listening, I'll stick to listening. But once you finish all the 5 chapters, you will get a better sense of how to improve your go-to-market. In this particular thing, I think today we live in a world where we have smartphones, we have a lot of heavy lifting done by technology, by cars, TVs, right? Get a tool that will do the heavy lifting. That'll be the line. Get a tool that'll kind of give you things on a platter. That should be your expectation baseline. Should say, I plug it in, I get insights to improve my success call, improve my sales call, improve my next call. That's the baseline. And find a tool. It might be a little expensive depending on how you look at your budget, or it might be cheap because, you know, the moment you see like, okay, I'm gonna spend this, I'm gonna make so much 3x, 5x return, it's not going to be cheap. Uh, it is going to be very cheap. It's not going to be expensive. Sorry. Uh, so I think that's your first step. Get a tool which will do the heavy lifting and gives you insights on a platter. Nothing less than that.
Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community. Thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds, and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.
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