How to Use AI Revenue Forensics to Improve Sales Performance

After years of working with B2B revenue teams, I see the same frustrations repeatedly bubble up: inaccurate forecasts, deals taking longer than expected to close, lower than expected win rates, and sales reps whose results wobble from quarter to quarter. 

Sales leaders, marketing leaders, and enablement heads all have opinions on what the real challenge is, and it's hard for stakeholders to reach 100% agreement. Revenue teams are wondering:  

• Are some reps wrong for the role (e.g., they lack the right skills/behavioral traits/experience)? 
• Is our training/enablement program inadequate?
• Are there particular sales managers who aren't supporting their direct reports?   
• Is the marketing/outbound team targeting the wrong segments or the wrong roles?  
• Are sellers not skilled enough in communicating our company’s unique, differentiated value?   
• Is our product lagging behind our competitors’? 

Or something else. 

The true culprit is often a combination of factors. But how does anyone know for sure when the facts are hiding in thousands of call recordings, CRM updates, and email threads?

Traditional Sales Analysis Tactics Fall Short 

Teams I've worked with have made serious attempts to identify the underlying causes of mediocre sales performance. Tactics I've tried or have seen include:   

• Listening to Gong/Chorus calls to understand what buyers are saying, what reps are pitching, who is involved in making decisions, etc. The challenge is that there's never enough time in the day to systematically analyze the calls to get a comprehensive picture of what's working and what's not. 
• Reading multiple Salesforce reports and conducting manual deal reviews individually. This approach falls short when CRM data is sparse because sales reps don't bother to input notes and even “required” fields into the CRM.  
• Conducting interviews with sales reps and asking about their deals. This method falls short because while reps can speak in detail about how they won their deals, they usually don’t know why they lost the deals they lost (e.g. prospects often just stop responding).    
• Conducting interviews with recently won customers and prospects who chose not to purchase.  The challenge is that the number of people willing to talk is low. 
• Investing in a new data warehouse/ data lake and hiring data engineers and data scientists to work on more comprehensive analytical projects. This is expensive, often requires new hires, and can take months to implement. 

All of these techniques are reasonable approaches. But they're time-consuming, expensive, and often affected by biases (people get defensive and don't answer questions honestly). 

In an uncertain economic environment where revenue teams must deliver results faster and often with fewer resources, teams must solve these problems quickly. 

I founded Intersight to address these gaps. You can think of Intersight as AI-powered revenue forensics. Using large language models to analyze every meeting transcript, email thread, and CRM field, we can surface patterns and granular insights humans miss and deliver objective, revenue-generating insights at scale. 

Intersight: AI-Powered Revenue Forensics

Intersight turns your historical deals data residing in your CRM, conversation intelligence, video conferencing tools ( meeting transcripts), and email into clear insights – so revenue teams (marketers, sales leaders, enablement professionals) can pinpoint what's driving success today and what's contributing to revenue leakage. 

We've developed specific insights reports to help you answer all kinds of questions about your buyers and sales team's behaviors. These reports allow you to pinpoint what needs fixing—whether that's skill gaps in sales reps, the message, the buyers, or the product. Here’s a sample set of questions you might have about your revenue performance which our AI revenue forensics system is well-suited to answer.   

Question: Do I have a people problem?

Solution: Intersight uses AI to compare the numerical performance of each seller (based on CRM data) and conducts a detailed analysis of each sales rep's behavior over time and spanning across multiple details. These reports are designed to answer questions such as:

1. What does this person do really well that elevates their results? 
2. What are the key deal progression tactics this seller tried to use? How effective was each tactic (based on observable buyer reactions)? 
3. What are the winning talk tracks and pitches that convert prospects into buyers? 
4. What are the specific areas of improvement for this individual?
5. How well did this seller demonstrate competency in key skill areas such as addressing buyer concerns, building rapport, demonstrating understanding of buyer needs, and doing consultative selling? 

Under the hood, we analyze all sales activities and customer interactions originating with each individual seller. We use advanced prompts to assess how sellers are doing in key skill areas such as discovery, listening and probing, demo effectiveness, articulating differentiators, solution tailoring, project management, and engagement. 

For a richer perspective, Intersight also generates comparative analyses of multiple sellers on a team and evaluates how each person is doing across a set of skills domains, including conducting discovery, listening and probing, demo effectiveness, articulating differentiators, solution tailoring, project management, and engagement.

Our reports will help you quickly determine how high and low performers behave differently. The insights might prompt a leader to:

• Make some personnel changes. 
• Take a more personalized approach to coaching, training, and mentoring team members.  
• Recruit team members with particular strengths to take on new leadership and mentorship responsibilities to teach or coach their peers.   
• Gain a deeper understanding of behavioral and personality traits of individuals who would be highly successful in the organization and as a result, adapt their recruiting and interviewing practices.
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Question: Where do my sellers need help? 

Different sellers are good (and bad) at different things. The challenge is to figure out how to deliver personalized coaching and assistance – only to those who need it. 

Solution: Intersight will help leaders pinpoint which team members need support in what areas. We provide this type of intelligence through several approaches:

• In our sales rep behavior and performance analysis reports (as mentioned above) 
• In our closed won and closed lost deals reports, which contain sections detailing what each person did well / didn’t do well on each of their deals. 

Question: Are my sales reps talking to the right buyers? Should they be finding other roles/titles to talk to?  

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‍Solution: Intersight will automatically surface the buyers (titles and roles in a buying cycle), their priorities, concerns, and objections in every closed deal report. We also give our users the ability to generate custom reports, which allow them to look at historical deals in the aggregate to uncover patterns in buyers, messaging, sales tactics used, and more.

Question: Which messages are landing and which ones are not? 

Solution: Intersight will automatically surface the winning messages vs. those that failed to create an impression on the buyers in each deal. We'll also analyze aggregate historical deals to uncover messaging patterns. 

Questions: Are we losing deals due to product gaps and weaknesses? Are our competitors doing better than us in specific product areas? 

Solution: Intersight will automatically recall and identify any mentions of competitors and perceived product gaps. We will also analyze multiple historical deals over time to uncover patterns in how prospects perceived our product capabilities and features. 

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Last Thoughts

With Intersight, your revenue team will get a continuous feedback loop that learns from every seller-buyer interaction, flags trends, and ensures that the right insights are routed to the right teams and leaders. Think of us as your revenue forensics team, helping you pinpoint precisely where revenue is leaking so you can fix it fast. 

With an AI powered approach, we'll help you save time in data analysis and insights generation, so you can figure out what to do to shorten your sales cycle, improve win rates and the skill level of every person on your team.  

Are you open to new ways to improve sales effectiveness or shortening time-to-close? 

If so, let’s find a time to chat.