Donald Trump could sharpen sales skills with AI next time – The Times of Israel

US President Donald Trumps reputation as a gonzo salesperson and savvy deal-clincher has been tainted by his inability to pass his health care reform bill, a fumble that may well be the subject of studies and speculation in coming years about what went wrong.

But in the here and now, there are new technologies available to help the US president figure it out. Startups are now developing artificial-intelligence (AI)-based technologies aimed at helping sales teams improve their sills and clinch that slippery deal.

One of them is Chorus.ai, a San Francisco- and Tel Aviv-based startup that uses AI to analyze sales conversations and learn how organizations can increase the number of deals they win.

Our software transcribes what is said in the call and analyzes the conversation: what topics were discussed? what questions were asked? is the person hesitant? Does their tone sound excited or engaged? said Micha Breakstone, co-founder and head of R&D at Chorus.ai in an interview at the companys offices in Tel Aviv. Our aim is to figure out the hidden dimensions that govern outcomes of human conversations.

Chorus.ai Israel-US teams (Courtesy)

The companys technology uses a combination of proprietary speech recognition, natural language processing and AI technologies developed in-house to transcribe, analyze and deliver real-time feedback on sales conversations. The software helps organizations understand their sales calls, detecting the most important moments and learning what teams could do differently to achieve better outcomes. This feedback helps sales managers coach their workers to improve their sales pitches and selling skills, Breakstone said.

In sales every 1 percent improvement in conversation translates to 1% bigger revenues for the company, said Breakstone, who holds a PhD in Cognitive Science from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and who previously co-founded Gingers Virtual Personal Assistant Platform Business Unit acquired by Intel in 2014.

With sales forces spending thousands or tens of thousands of hours each quarter in online or phone meetings with customers and prospects, conversations are a sales forces most valuable and underutilized asset, he said.

No one has opened up the sales calls for analysis, he said. Conversation Intelligence is such a new concept, it took time to convince people of its value, but now customers are asking for it.

The company, founded two years ago by Roy Raanani, the companys CEO, Breakstone, and Russell Levy as founding CTO, released its software in late 2016 and has since has been selling its product to billion-dollar companies with huge sales forces, according to Breakstone.

Chorus.ai co-founder Roy Raanani, the companys CEO (Courtesy)

Its customers, including Qualtrics, Marketo and Dynamic Signal, have used the Chorus.ai platform during the last year to analyze hundreds of thousands of sales conversations, he said.

This is how it works: Customers use Choruss SaaS software to make calls, prospects are notified the call is being recorded, then Chorus.ais software records, transcribes and analyzes all the conversations in real-time, giving sales managers access to a huge amount of information regarding the sales process that they can then use to coach their reps.

The software also allows for the classification of conversations by topic, time of calls, and speak/listen ratio, and can be set to highlight when specific moments or topics like price or budget are mentioned; and also, what the next steps are, like whether a conversation needs to have a follow-up call or not.

This is coaching on steroids, said Breakstone. Also, we help companies automatically surface what differentiated closing deals vs. failed pitches. We can analyze topics and see if there is a pattern.

The software has found some counterintuitive insights.

More questions are better than fewer, but they need to be open-ended and engaging, Breakstone said. Also, it can sometime be good to mention competitors in the conversation. When a prospect mentions a competitor, they already know the market, and may be closer to making a final decision, he said. And that means the pitch can be changed to home in on a close.

Chorus.ai issues reports that highlight patterns and indicate what could be done better. The company is also working on an update to be released next month that will give sales reps real-time analysis and tips on how they can do better, like, You are talking too fast or too long, or, when such and such question was asked, the best reps have used this answer to close the deal.

Micha Breakstone, Chorus.ai co-founder and president (Courtesy)

Technology is not the hitch to providing immediate feedback, said Breakstone. What makes the matter sensitive is the focus and attention of the salespeople. The big question is how to give them the feedback subtly, without distracting them from the call.

Sales tech startups globally raised $5 billion in funding in 2016, CB Insights, a New York-based data company said in a March 21 report. These include companies that are developing tech-enabled solutions that directly serve sales teams or improve the sales process, as well as serving customer relationship management platforms.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that by 2020 there will be 2.6 million inside sales reps, those who work over the phone in the US, up from 1.2 in 2010.

People travel much less these days to sell, said Breakstone. There are fewer face-to-face deals and communications are becoming more virtual. Video conferences are almost as good as fact to face. That is how people are selling today, and we are creating a new product category in this space, he said.

Russell Levy, founding CTO of Chorus.ai (Courtesy)

Chorus.ai keeps the recorded calls as long for as the customer remains on board, then deletes them. The statistical metadata collected, however, stays with Chorus.ai.

At the moment the technology works only with English. But other languages are doable, said Breakstone. We need to invest money and work to do that, he said. It is as if now we have built a stereo system and all we have to do to get it to work with other languages is to change the disk.

Chorus.ai is in a market that is in a positive trajectory point and is expected to grow rapidly in the immediate future, said Zirra.com Ltd., a Tel Aviv-based research firm that analyzes private companies using artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. However, as there are many existing companies already in the market space, Chorus.ai must display a strong differentiating factor in order to surpass the clutter.

Direct competitors include Deepgram, TalkIQ, and Persado, Zirra said.

In February Chorus.ai raised $16 million in a Series A financing round led by Redpoint Ventures with participation from original seed investor Emergence Capital.

We spent a year researching the market and its clear to us that Chorus.ai is the leader, Tomasz Tunguz, a partner at Redpoint Ventures said at the time of the announcement. Their unique technology enables them to provide real-time feedback to account executives, accelerating training, tuning performance and empowering those teams to win more business every day.

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Donald Trump could sharpen sales skills with AI next time - The Times of Israel