Measure your success by the success of your customers. Every go-to-market team should bring the voice of their customers to every decision they make.
MEDIA 7: Please tell us a little bit about yourself and take us through your professional journey.
NATALIE SEVERINO: I’ve had several leadership roles in marketing, with organizations including Intuit, Logitech, Trend Micro, ClearSlide and more. While at Intuit, I had the opportunity to work as a marketing leader within the sales organization, which shaped my understanding of how to capture customer needs and concerns. This helped me build better relationships with customers to eventually lead to revenue growth. I also had an amazing female sponsor who was a vice president of sales which wasn’t common at the time. She was a strong strategic thinker that taught me the importance of empowering women in sales, sharing tools for success and creating pathways to leadership roles. She helped me become a great leader and how to make people feel invested in their careers.
M7: Could you please briefly describe the impact the Chorus.ai application would have if a company were to implement it tomorrow?
NS: From the moment you implement Chorus.ai, reps can stop spending hours collecting notes on each deal, managers can get in-depth visibility into deal progression and the customer success team can quickly see what’s being talked about on calls and what prospects care most about. What we’re really doing is capturing the actual voice of the customer through every sales conversation. With insight into every interaction, Revenue teams can get key information on the status of their relationships, what’s going on across the pipeline and what they need to do to progress their deals.
One of our most notable and recent developments, when customers use our Momentum Suite, they can easily spot deal risks and understand the interactions that drive revenue, like call participants, key discussion items and recommendations for future interactions. It allows Revenue teams to access the voice of the customer in real-time directly from emails, calls and video meeting interactions inside your CRM platform.
AI is already here so it’s important for businesses to embrace it for what it is — a tool to enhance, not replace, the abilities of your Revenue teams.
M7: How do you ensure that your sales team understands and presents the products and services in an engaging manner?
NS: Ultimately, it’s going to be a mix of great marketing content, compelling go-to-marketing messaging and preparing assets for our Sales Enablement teams to support the revenue organization. But to be more prescriptive, Revenue teams can create engaging moments by coming prepared with a list of the most relevant questions, which they’re able to create by pulling out keywords and phrases from previous calls, and spreading them out over the course of the call. It’s important not to bombard the prospect with more than two questions per minute, which lowers engagement and makes them feel interrogated. When the prospect provides an answer that’s longer than 30 seconds, it’s considered an engaging moment. The goal is to have at least two engaging moments per call, which have a 60% greater chance of getting reps to the next stage.
At Chorus, we’re harnessing the voice of the customer to guide every decision we make. As marketers, we’re leveraging the insights obtained from our Conversation Intelligence to create content and messaging that resonates and connects with current and prospective customers. Our ability to truly understand the customer relationship allows us to better engage with the sales team and deliver content that accelerates deal velocity and drives revenue.
M7: How does Chorus.ai’s application help in improving the win rate of the user’s sales teams?
NS: Chorus’ platform helps Revenue teams understand the changing needs of their buyers and the key messages and moments that impact them throughout the journey. For example, MongoDB was able to streamline handoffs between sales and customer success while increasing customer engagement and retention.
Since the outset of the pandemic, we’ve witnessed an increase in C-suite involvement on calls, with CXOs participating in buying decisions 86% more often than before. With our AI, Revenue leaders can and should anticipate C-Suite involvement and prepare their team for how to speak with C-Level executives when they join. For example, Revenue leaders can ensure their reps are communicating immediate and extreme ROI earlier in the sales cycle to increase the likelihood of CXOs greenlighting the deal.
By delivering a customer-centric experience, we’re developing stronger relationships with our customers and enabling them to achieve their desired business outcomes.
M7: What do you believe are the top three marketing challenges in the post COVID-19 era?
NS: The top three marketing challenges in the post-COVID-19 era are identifying and prioritizing high-priority leads, building relationships with buyers in a virtual, hybrid, or in-person office environment, and understanding the new buyer journey. Marketers had to be quick on their feet this past year — the pandemic disrupted business as we know it, providing marketers with an opportunity to get creative and think differently about how they orchestrate the buyer's journey. An opportunity to innovate.
I’m proud of how my team responded — we launched a webinar on remote sales productivity with hundreds of sales professionals nine days after the shutdown. We hosted an executive briefing with our CEO Jim Benton to surface deep data insights about sales productivity and trends. We planned amazing virtual events that accelerated the pipeline and created real engagement between our customers and our executive team.
Moving forward, we’re focused on adapting to the hybrid world — for our employees and our customers. How do we ensure they are receiving a great experience whether they are in the room or not? I'm confident we’ll continue to innovate and find the right solutions!
M7: How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a Business Leader?
NS: According to TOPO, Conversation Intelligence will be integrated into the entire sales enablement stack and across all of sales tech by the end of this year. AI is already here so it’s important for businesses to embrace it for what it is — a tool to enhance, not replace, the abilities of your Revenue teams. It’s a powerful tool that can solve extremely difficult problems, but humans are in the driving seat. As our CEO likes to say, “We need technology-enabled humans, not human-enabled technology.”
M7: What is your marketing mantra to stand out in an overly saturated MarTech space?
NS: Measure your success by the success of your customers. Every go-to-market team should bring the voice of their customers to every decision they make. By delivering a customer-centric experience, we’re developing stronger relationships with our customers and enabling them to achieve their desired business outcomes. This mantra has helped Chorus become the most advanced solution in Conversation Intelligence.