How to Use AI Revenue Forensics to Improve Sales Performance

After years of working with B2B revenue teams and enabling mid-market and enterprise AEs, 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 teams and RevOps teams all have opinions on what the real challenge is, and what investments should be made next. Revenue teams are wondering:  

• What specific sales tactics and messaging are consistently winning deals?
• Are specific product or adoption issues causing us to lose deals?  
• What's the highest-impact initiative to add to our sales training and enablement program?
• 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?  
• Which sellers need to get better at communicating our company’s unique, differentiated value?  
• At what stage are deals stalling and why?

Revenue teams are eager to get better visibility into deals and understand the behavioral, tactical, and messaging changes their sellers should make to improve effectiveness and revenue outcomes.

Traditional Sales Performance 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 personally 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, revenue teams must deliver results faster and often with fewer resources, while buyers scrutinize every purchase more closely. To succeed, revenue teams must quickly learn from their experience and use analytics to continuously refine their winning strategy, ICP, and deal management process.  

However, many organizations today struggle to make sense of their numerous sales activity data, which is stored in different formats across disparate systems. All too often, actionable insights needed to lift revenue outcomes are hiding within hundreds or thousands of call recordings, meeting transcripts, CRM updates, and email threads. Revenue teams often lack the data science and AI expertise, as well as the internal resources, to mine this data for insights effectively.

I founded Intersight to address these gaps.

Intersight: AI-Powered Revenue Forensics

Intersight is an AI-powered revenue forensics system that sits on top of CRMs, meeting conference tools, email, and conversation intelligence tools. We use large language models (LLMs) to map all types of unstructured sales activity and customer interaction data to deals and their outcomes. We've trained AI to deeply analyze this data to figure out how behaviors, deal progression tactics and messaging influence buyer behavior and deal outcomes, surfacing patterns and actionable sales insights humans miss and delivering objective, revenue-generating insights at scale. 

We've developed specific insights reports to help you answer all kinds of questions about your buyers, sales team's behaviors and how different pairings of buyer-seller interactions influence deal outcomes. These reports allow you to pinpoint what needs fixing—whether that's skill gaps in sales reps, the message, the buyers, or the product. We've invested heavily in training AI to critically observe sales reps' and buyer behavior and look for patterns across large datasets (e.g. a year worth of closed lost deals data). Here’s a sample of the types of questions you can answer with our AI revenue insights reports to diagnose your issues and start gaining insights to steer your team in the right direction.

Question: How can I better develop my people and deliver personalized feedback and coaching?

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: Which sellers need support and coaching, and with what exactly?  

Different sellers excel at different things. For instance, one sales rep may excel in initial discovery but struggle to translate what they've learned into a narrative on how the product can be used to drive a mission-critical outcome for the prospect organization. This team member needs help in this area. Meanwhile, a second sales rep may be great at pitching and demoing but their deals are stalling due to insufficient deal process and stakeholder management. The challenge is to uncover who is doing what, what's working vs. not, and how to deliver personalized coaching and assistance to each individual.  

Solution: Intersight will help leaders pinpoint which team members need support in what areas. The recommendations are grounded in observed behavior, tactics, talking points used and how those actions impacted buyer behavior and deal outcomes.  

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. 

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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.