Over the past decade, sales has embraced email and social media to reach clients, but recent trends are showing a renewed focus on the phone as businesses try to provide a more personalized customer experience.

It is not that the phone disappeared, rather it simply faded into the noise of the sales organization. A tool managed by IT and outside of control. A commodity that organizations assumed had reached the end of its evolution. Like your water or electricity, it was only ever thought about when it wasn’t working.

However, as organizations look to provide both a better buyer experience and to understand their own internal sales processes, the realization of voice’s importance to sales is being highlighted.

From Old-School to New-School

10 years ago, the idea of business telephony in the cloud was laughable, but today we see a series of business communications companies providing fully digital or hybrid services to businesses. This new breed of communications vendors are unlocking access to voice data in a way never possible before.

Using AI, or VI (Voice Intelligence), companies are able to move beyond traditional phone activity metrics. Instead of looking at the number of dials or call length, we can begin actually looking at the effectiveness of our calls. We can now review caller sentiment, important moments within a call (with corresponding transcripts), action items, and keyword mentions.

On top of this, sales teams can move beyond post-call coaching opportunities, to guidance and interactions that impact calls in real-time. Providing callers with live coaching and real-time recommendations to ensure that each call is as effective as possible.

The Impact of Voice

While a significant amount of time is spent with emails and chat messages, a recent study by Salesforce.com showed that 92 percent of all customer interactions still happen over the phone. This alone showcases the importance of voice in the sales process, but picking up the phone and calling a customer has other benefits as well.

Phone calls not only guide sales to a truly personalized conversation with customers but also brings your business to life. By giving your customers a voice to connect with, your offers become more than just words on a page. They come alive with the personality of your reps. Even better, in today’s world of email automation, a phone call stands out to buyers, differentiating you from others in the space.

This is especially important in the startup space where getting things moving is the difference between success and failure. A startup has to be ahead of the game as far as competition is concerned and leveraging voice can give a new company the edge.

Scaling Your Conversations

To help organizations scale their conversations, Dialpad has launched the first telephony system purposefully built for sales, Dialpad Sell. Built around Voice Intelligence (VI), Dialpad Sell arms reps with real-time-recommendations, live coaching, and guided selling. While at the same time, automatically logging call transcripts and notes back to their CRM, reducing the amount of time spent on non-selling activities.

The conversation still matters and the phone call is at the center of it all. By leveraging a telephony system that augments the in-call experience, helping guide reps through conversations in the moment, organizations are able to ramp reps faster, scale their managers time more effectively, and drive revenue.

Unlock the power of Voice within your organization.

Voice Returns To Sales was originally published on Silicon Slopes