Fueling Sales AI With Conversation Intelligence

If your AI strategy feels stuck, it’s probably missing the fuel that matters most: conversations. We dig into how conversation intelligence turns buyer-seller dialogue into structured data that LLMs can analyze, answer questions about, and convert into real coaching and revenue impact. Instead of treating recording as the finish line, we map the full system that connects email, calendar, mobile, and in-person meetings, then associates each interaction to the right account and opportunity so insights actually land where work gets done.

We break down the current tool landscape—from web conferencing and note takers to full revenue orchestration—and explain where each shines. Then we unpack the eight capabilities that separate helpful from transformational: accurate association, multi-channel capture, summaries that scale to account and opportunity, automated scorecards with snippet-linked coaching, natural-language questions across your dataset, smart triggers for objections and competitor mentions, AI-led discovery of emerging themes, and reporting that trends real change over time. You’ll hear why web calls represent only a slice of the truth and how to close the gaps that hide risk.

Finally, we spotlight four workflows already being rewritten by AI: automatic CRM field updates that clean your pipeline without manual data entry, deal visibility that reflects what was said rather than what was remembered, on-demand account plans generated from the conversation graph, and one-click pre-call prep that levels up every meeting. The takeaway is simple and urgent: capture broadly, associate correctly, and push insights back to sellers where it counts. Subscribe, share with a teammate who owns your sales stack, and tell us which workflow you want to automate first.

Transcript

Seth Marrs 0:05

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Innovative Revenue Leader Podcast. So today I'm going to be talking about conversation intelligence. And the reason I'm talking about this right now is next week we're going to talk about some of the predictions for 2026, which are for in sales, which are undoubtedly going to have a ton of AI in it, a ton of discussions around how you get the most out of it. And then following that, we're going to do a four-week series around agents and what they mean to B2B revenue, how well how you can leverage them, have some guests on that can talk about it. But foundationally, none of this stuff works if you're not able to capture a conversation between a buyer and a seller. So anybody who's out there that's that's trying to implement an AI initiative, and your tech department is saying you can't capture and analyze conversations, you really can't. You can't do AI really well. You can't leverage these tools to their greatest and like capabilities if you're not capturing conversation. That is the fuel that will generate the majority of the value. It doesn't mean that it's all of the value, but if you really want to understand what's going on and really drive improved effectiveness with your sales team, you need these types of tools. So I just wanted to take a step back in this series and talk to what this is. So a little history for me. I've been covering conversation intelligence type tools for six plus years. I wrote the first Forester Wave on it, which was an evaluative report along with a colleague named Shell Carlson. And we wrote it on B2B revenue, say B2B and B2C sales and marketing. And then I've probably done five or six evaluative reports around it. I spent a year writing on this. It's something that I've I've held very closely to and find a lot of value in. It's also a category/slash feature that a lot of people don't understand. So hopefully in this episode, I can talk you through some of that, give you a feel for some of the things that are going on in it. And I think the best place to start is a definition like what is conversation intelligence. So some people just think that's the tool I use to record my calls. That's not if that's all you think it is, then then this definition to you is very much basically a web conferencing platform. But conversation intelligence basically uses AI to turn a conversation into a form that allows an LLM to go over the top of it, ask questions to it, and drive insights back, but allow you to improve effectiveness, understand things that you couldn't see before. So the art of selling was basically the dialogue happening between the buyer and the seller that, when captured, can actually be turned into a science and used to drive insights that most importantly can be redirected back to the seller to help them improve, not redirected into your leader or someone to be able to criticize or give you insights around the forecast, although those things are possible. The biggest value is really in the seller getting insights that didn't that they didn't have before. And it allows for you to magnify or improve your trade like you've never been able to do before. So that's what conversation has the basic definition. When I talk about it, that's that's what I mean by that. So why is it critical? If you think about the lifeblood of a seller, it's buyer-seller conversations, that's where deals are won. If you're in a competitive deal, the ability to engage and properly talk to a customer around positioning, around influencing, all of that stuff is where the magic happens in sales. These tools are a part of understanding that. So that's the only way that you can do it. Like you have to analyze those conversations. And you want to understand what that looks like so you can improve it and create that cycle back to be able to ensure that when you're in front of a customer, you get the most out of it. And you can't take advantage, like I said earlier, of any of these AI tools that are looking at conversations if you don't have a conversation to actually record. So conversation intelligence is that tool. And whether that's embedded in your CRM, it's embedded in your web conferencing platform, or you're buying a tool specifically, a note taker or whatever, you need that to be able to fuel your AI initiatives. So that's why it's important to talk to it today. So just foundationally, if you think about conversation intelligence vendors, I usually break them into three different types because there's different aspirations. For some reason, people don't think of web conferencing platforms like Teams and Zoom are a conversation intelligence tool. They are, they're lightweight in terms of their focus, but they have a lot of the capabilities. Really, the only difference with a lot of them is they don't have a bot, which means they can't join every call. You can only do the recording on your particular call. Zoom actually does have a bot, so you could you could use it for both. So Zoom kind of is set up as a way to be a note taker as well. Note taker is really a bot that can come on and and really handle any call. So and they're more focused on being a good note taker, so they do things like summaries really well and other stuff that you would have in notes that are beyond just all the infrastructure of recording the call. So that that's another segment of it. And then you have another segment that's very revenue focused, and those are the revenue orchestration platforms. The vendors in that space are really focused on how do I tackle the sales use case. That means their models are very focused on sales and revenue, that the tools that they put around it, the integrations they have, the data and how they mix it together are very much focused on revenue. But depending on where you are, so if you're sitting there going, I don't have an orchestration tool like a gong or momentum or tension, um, all I have is Zoom, there are things you can do with that that would be valuable. Maybe can't get you to where you want to go with some of the bigger stuff, but it no matter what tool you have, and I would all but guarantee everybody has at least one type of tool, whether you just have a web conferencing platform or an orchestration tool, that's what you need to use as your capture engine to be able to start deriving insights. So next the next thing I want to talk through is just eight features that that you really need to understand when you're thinking about conversation intelligence. And I want to give you a flavor of like low qual, like like low feature level versus medium versus high, and just talk to that a little bit. So I'll go through some of these features so you have a feel when you're thinking about these tools, what what you should you be looking for and what's important. First, and this is this is the part that people don't look at is how do you associate those conversations to the right place so you can analyze them in context. So, for example, if I want to understand what's going on in an account, my conversations all need to be associated to that account. So if you don't have like a low-level tool would not have or would have just basic association. I take the domain name and I put it onto an account, and however many accounts have that domain, all my interactions are kind of copied over there. That gives you account level. It makes it really hard to get to opportunity level because there's just not technology to get it there. And then you get to kind of the medium lender level vendors who will either say, Yeah, just let CRM do that, which usually, unless you put a lot of work into your CRM association is pretty poor. Um, but that's taking something as simple as saying, oh, I'm gonna take a contact, and if you attach a contact to the if I take a contact to put it on the opportunity, I'm just gonna flow all those in. So only the ones with those contacts will be on those opportunities. That's great. The other thing you have to do in those tools is you have to do auto association, so you don't let the seller assign the contact. If they're on a web conference, you associate everybody in that contact to the opportunity. Not as it's it's not perfect, but it's better. And then the high-level ones provide a fairly detailed level of sophistication to help you unpick the challenges that you have in a complex organization. Like an enterprise organization, like if you do domain level, you could have eight accounts with the same, you could have hundreds of accounts with the same domain. Think of like a Walmart and the number of accounts that you would have there. So you need sophistication to understand, to be able to wait based on last email came in versus at most active on the opportunity on the different accounts, meaning, you know, there's been a lot of activity on this account and none on these 300. So I know that, so I'm going to put the opportunities there. So I say this, and it's probably the most boring part that nobody looks at, but the most critical. You can get yourself to like 60, 70% if you're just doing basic association, get yourself to like 80% if you're doing the contact flow through, and then get yourself into 90, 95% if you're doing like the high-level architectural stuff where you're really aligning it. Um think about that. That's really important. There isn't a perfect solution yet. What you're going to see over time is these tools starting to analyze the call and do association based on the context of the call. That's not too far away. Um, companies will just need to build it in, but those associations go a long way. Because if you have an opportunity that has very targeted conversations that are on that specific opportunity for that specific opportunity, versus a bunch of account level conversations that may or may not be relevant, it's very different than if you just have like general context. So it allows you to do more. It's important if you're not doing it, you should look into how I do better association. What does it look like? Push your vendors to really understand that. Next one is just connecting conversations. If you think that this is just for web conferencing, that is a very, very small part of it. You need to have your email and calendar connected. I would argue that you need to have your mobile phone connected. If you're doing BYOD, which almost everybody is, you should kill that and you should go to a soft phone where you have the number assigned by the company and your sellers need to call off that number, and there's an auto record that happens off of that, or at the very least, an auto tracking where that call is updated so you know that a call happened. All possible, very few companies do it. There are lots of phone conversations that happened between a buyer and a seller. So it despite what people will say about it going away, if you're deep in a deal and you have a good relationship, you're likely going to pick up the phone and call that person to help move that deal forward. And the other thing is the in-person side. It's getting more as sellers get more comfortable with this technology and start to realize how they can get value from it, they're asking for more. Let me record a phone call in person where I put my mobile phone down. Tools have that where you can do it. You have like a hacked version that you could do as well, where you can just open up your Zoom and play that one and record it. But ideally, you'd have something that would be formally set up to do it that way because acoustics and all that stuff would be a little bit different. You'd want it to be built for that purpose, but it it can work and it and it does work. And most of these technologies, they have varying levels of sophistication. They're listening for voice to do voice separation. So even if there's five people in a room, some of them can get actually really good at identifying those voices and at properly associating them. But even if you can't do that, you'd at least have the conversation assigned to that account, that opportunity. So that allows me to connect more conversations together. So I've talked before about how do you associate them. Connecting conversations lets you have broader conversations. If you are just analyzing off of web conferencing, it's like 10-15% of the conversations that are happening. You've got to get the email and you need to have calendaring in so you can see what's going on when a meeting happened and there wasn't a recording. So at least you know a meeting happened. Like those types of things. So you've got to focus on broadening your conversations. So those are kind of two infrastructure things. Here's some basic stuff. Like, summaries are obviously really prevalent now. Like that's a great tool Jen AI can do. It could take a summary from anything. Think of these in three different ways. So call level, dead easy. It's one call. You can get a summary on that. There's some pretty easy, is it's it's it's not aggregating from multiple places or multiple conversations. So you'll see that on every tool. Every tool has it from web conferencing on up. Note takers will do a little bit more because they understand the importance of a customized summary. So they'll they spend a lot more effort to build capabilities in like a FAPAM that has they can build all these templates that'll look at it and talk about it in different ways. That's that's the next level type stuff. And then the other summaries are when you get to object level, so account level, opportunity level, contact level, where you can aggregate all this stuff together and get really cool summaries around what's going on in the account, what's going on in the in the opportunity, what's going on with this contact. That sets the foundation for some game-changing capabilities around standard things that sellers have had to do forever, like account plans. If I can do an account summary based on just a request that aggregates all the conversations, I don't need I don't need to do all that stuff myself. I can let the tools do it. Another one is scorecards. So scorecards have got have grown in sophistication over the last, especially in B2B. B2C, they've been super sophisticated for a long time, but now they're getting a lot more sophisticated. So base level, like the low-level ones, will give you uh, you know, you go tick the box and the seller listens to the call and they type it in. And even that's that's getting less and less. I think people have realized sales leakers won't do that or won't do that very well. So even the ones that are doing that now or providing some sort of AI recommendation, but that's basic. And and another thing you have to look at is what types of scoring you could do. One through ten, one through five, yes, no, text, any of that stuff. But that's base level. Like base level, you do the scoring. Medium level is you'll see companies that'll do a pre-configure. Medic's a classic one. Everybody can score medic because it's just very straightforward to score. So building a model that can train to look at it. Be careful when you have someone doing medic level deal scoring versus macro deal scoring. But the that custom template that is built for you, the reason why that's more valuable is the companies will train it. They train it, train it, train it. So when they give it to you, it the logic has been proven out rather than you kind of building a summary truck, a summary template on your own, and kind of it doesn't have the same training. So that's the next level. The highest level one is just the automated scoring. You build it, you train it using prompting or design, any sort of different things, and it automatically scores for you. That is the market where it's going. It's getting a lot, lot better. You can do a ton of stuff. It's really on you at the level that you can really train this to get accurate scores. So now you're stopping having to do full call reviews. You just listen to it and then understand what the score is, and you coach off the score, and you coach off the really good tools, will take you right to the snippet and give you examples that you could look at. So you're coaching based on those things. Another thing is really straightforward asking questions to conversations. So there's varying levels, but you there's a lot of times you have a question you want to ask, you call a person. I would recommend if you have these tools, like a gong's really popular for this, like just ask questions to it. Every tool will allow you to ask a question to a call. So from web conferencing, note-kaking up, you can ask a question to a call and get an answer. The next level would be I can ask a question to an object where I go to the account and I ask a question to an account, ask a question to an opportunity, ask a question to a to a contact, and you get an answer back based on all the aggregated conversations that have happened over a period of time. The really sophisticated ones are doing allowing you to ask a question to your entire data set. So I'm asking a question, a general question, and it searches the system searches through, pulls back a response based on all the objects, all the data points, that type of stuff, or a certain set of those to get a very sophisticated answer that's looking across multiple channels, tools, data sets, all that. Those are the different levels there. Another thing that's really, really valuable is triggers. So your ability to set something up so that I can identify when it happens on a call. So you have like the low-level one would be keywords and phrases. That's been around forever. If a word comes up, flag it. If a phrase comes up, flag it. So that's that's fairly remedial. But the many of the like web conferencing, those types of tools won't have this. But having just base, this that works great for like competitor mentions and those types of things. Low level, but that's that that's what that trigger would look like. Medium is the same thing that I talked about before with with scorecards. You do pre-trained triggers. These companies have figured out the ones that are most prevalent. They build them for you, they're really good. You just put them in place and maybe tune them to your business. And then the high-level ones are doing prompt created triggers, like where I can go in, build it out, and ask for exactly what I want. So I can get surgical around my objection for my company and I want to see it. And then when it when it sees it, it flags it and it can alert, it keeps track of it. So you can do trending, all of those types of things. So really sophisticated, really valuable. The next thing is finding conversations. This is fairly remedial. Everyone's gonna have folders and shares and snippets that you could do all the way through web conferencing. Then you have the medium level where you take your keywords and you put them in and you say these are the things I want you to look for, and it just kind of tracks those things so you can easily find them, similar to what you see in others, where you have like a folder and then you have a keyword, so it allows you, like you see this in in like note apps, like ever, like Evernote or or in any of those, or OneNote. And then they're the high-level ones are the ones that do AI generate. They're looking for trends in, and they start surfacing those trends up when they see them. So you'll get really interesting like triggers or tags that you may have not have thought of, but it's coming up over and over and allows you to do things around insights that you would have never done because you didn't know that was happening, you didn't know to ask it was happening. And then the next thing is around reporting. When you think about reporting, this is this is critically important for you to understand what's going on. The low-level version will do behavioral stuff. Everyone does behavioral, your talk time, your monologues, your questions, that type of stuff. Straightforward, every tool will do that. The the next level is topic level. So when you get to the topics where it's identifying those topics and then allowing you to understand how often they're happening and reporting them at the individual person, and so you can track them. And then the more the most sophisticated ones are doing trending, where I can take all those triggers and things that are happening and show you how they're trending over time. So as you're training, maneuvering things around, making adjustments, you can watch those numbers go up and down. So, really critical to a leader that's trying to understand the impact of the things they're doing. So you want to have the trending, you want to have that visibility. So those are eight features that are really critical. So if you're thinking about like how do I maximize my ability to capture conversations and do it the right way, take those eight things and evaluate around it what your current situation has. So the last thing I want to do here is just talk about four things that are going to be disrupted based on what I just talked about here. They're already being disrupted in a fairly large way. And you should think about it when you're looking at this technology, or you're just looking about how do I make a difference with AI in your company. First one, the biggest one, is auto-update of fields. If you're not currently today looking for a way to have your sellers stop inputting data into CRM, that is a mistake because the technology is getting to the point where you could do some some really, really cool stuff. Companies like win.ai have been have been working on this for years and are getting pretty good at it. Gonk just released something or with data extractor around this where you can just have the conversation analyze and apply it to a field. At first, this has been around forever where you can just take text and then throw the text into a field in CRM, but now it's getting sophisticated enough that you could identify it and use a list of values. You can identify it and say this means yes or no, and then you can update everything. So if you're looking for the a gigantic way to get efficiency and then a better understanding of deals, you should be in you should be investigating this heavily and working like crazy to get your sellers out of data entry. Just think of things like stage progression. Anyone like stage progression has been garbage for years, it doesn't work, sellers don't update it. This would allow you to actually use stage progression because it'd be happened automatically based on the conversation. And it'll also allow you to do stage regression where when you see things not happen, you could draw it back. So it'd make that staging really valuable and also really valuable for partnership with sales and marketing, because that's a important staging is really important in that relationship. So they this is probably the most like early stage of the ones I'll talk about, but absolutely critical, and you should absolutely be experimenting with it. Next one is deal visibility. This one's been around for a long time, but your ability to understand the conversations and have it map it to your qualification details to how how you look at the questioning to understand and say, Oh, what's my like you can use medic, you can use anything like that, where you're trying to understand if you've qualified the customer. That's been around for a while. It's fairly, it's probably the it's probably the most advanced in terms of people using it, but you should be using this to determine your whether your sales team has done the qualification, has done the work that they they needed to do and have it as part of your forecasting. That's probably the nuance for me is a lot of people weren't using it for forecasting and now a lot of a lot are starting to realize wait, I can get a lot of value from pulling conversations into under better understand where my deals are and which ones they're going to close. The third one's account planning if you're still having your seller like spend a week and a half updating a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint or something to be able to create their account plans you are wasting a ton of time and your account plans aren't sustainable. In the past you'd have like big organizations with big high level accounts that are that you would do that for sellers would do it, take forever to do it, pitch it, and then never touch it again because they can't they don't have the time to with conversation intelligence and these tools you can just set the structure up and allow that to be on demand. So you can do it for every account you put click a button and it pulls up your account plan then the seller just provides their input and then they get inputs back. Because if you set the account plan up it should be insightful for the seller too. That's changing the entire game on how account clients and to me it it should spark a renaissance in use. It may not spark a renaissance in vendors but it'll be a key feature in any tool that is working to uh support an enterprise organization because any big enterprise will have these types of account plans or at least aspire to have them and out and have them for for real. And then the the the final one is this pre-call prep. If you don't use this for pre-call prep then you're wasting a lot of your seller's time. Actually you're probably not wasting your seller's time your seller's probably not doing it. And then if you're going up against a seller where you have a button that can click and it'll go pre-call prep for you and bring everything in in the conversation and say what's going on think about if you're a seller that has that going up against a seller who doesn't who's just kind of trying to figure it all out and doesn't know all this stuff and can't go in and get it you're gonna you're gonna struggle to represent yourself at the same level as those who have a tool like this that that would allow you to do it. So those are the four areas to to just to recap from the reason why I'm talking conversation intelligence now and these important features is kind of set us up for what's coming in the prediction side and what's coming on the agent side because you're gonna see a lot of different stuff and things that are going to be really cool and where things are going. But foundationally the easiest thing to do right now is and the must do if you want any of this stuff to actually be real is you have to you have to find a way to get your conversations captured and to have a plan to understand how to analyze use the capabilities that already exist today. I hope this was was useful and we'll talk to you next week