Conversational Coaching Was Introduced at Dreamforce 2019 – But Can Salesforce Leapfrog Innovative Entrants in the Space?

Salesforce announced during Dreamforce 2019 that it would be introducing a new Einstein-branded capability: dynamic call coaching. Baked into Sales Cloud, the feature uses conversational data to drive automated coaching of sales representatives based on keywords or phrases they use in their calls. This feedback can be leveraged to improve sales pitches and the buying experience for the customer.

Using machine learning to mine sales coaching insights from conversational data is a new frontier of interest to many startups and sales organizations. Gong is widely considered a leader in this space – it was only a matter of time before a larger customer experience vendor like Salesforce also made a concerted push into the market.

The promise of these solutions is that they will free up sales managers from listening to lengthy call recordings and enable them to instead focus on aggregate trends and patterns. They will also allow organizations to provide more feedback at scale (for example, providing coaching on every call rather than a random sample). The reality is these products are still in their early days and are subject to deficiencies in audio quality or the effectiveness of their natural language processing algorithms. But as these algorithms, keyword identification, and coaching based on datasets improve, the market will only heat up.

Salesforce’s foray into this space is a smart one: by nestling its call-coaching functionality natively within Sales Cloud, it has created a compelling single-vendor story. We expect that, as time progresses, Salesforce will roll this functionality into its customer service products as well to deliver similar insights to contact center managers.

Source: Salesforce Sales Cloud at SoftwareReviews.

Our Take

• Salesforce, an industry leader in customer relationship management (CRM) applications, recently introduced Einstein Call Coaching into its Sales Cloud offering to provide sales representatives with coaching based on conversational data (and to provide their managers with aggregate call trend analysis).
• The move is a smart one and will allow Salesforce to capture share from up-and-coming vendors like Gong.

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