The goal of any sale is a favorable exchange of value or service for monetary compensation. The sales models vary across industry, deal-stage, or designation, but the framework of value exchange remains the same. This blog discusses talk tracks, a conversation structure used by salespersons to favorably navigate their sales interactions with prospects, customers, or other stakeholders, and how to build winning ones.
What are talk tracks?
Simply put, a talk track is a conversation structure designed to assist salespeople while they converse with prospects and stakeholders. The goal of a talk track is to help the sales person push communication with prospects towards closing by gathering required information (qualification), communicating the value of their offering (pitch), and answering questions or concerns potential customers might have (objection handling).
How are they different from a script?
Call scripts offer little flexibility to the salesperson to take control of the conversation. Call scripts take a one-size-fits-all approach. All reps must do is stick to the call script no matter what prospects say. It is assumed that this call script will give the highest success rate.
On the other hand, talk tracks only give a direction for sales reps to follow. They are a set of conversational cues listed together to help salespeople set the tone, and take control of the conversation. The sales reps can steer the conversation as they fit after considering their prospects’ inputs. They enable reps to take more of a customizable approach to selling.
Key Differences
Talk tracks suit companies that have not yet nailed their pitch, whereas call scripts are better for companies that have their pitch locked in and want to scale their selling efforts. With the sales landscape shifting almost every day, no company should rely on just one approach.
Talk Track
Call Script
A general outline of the conversation
Specific structure to a conversation
Offers some freedom to sales reps
Generally rigid and offers little flexibility
Reps can handle outlier conversations since they don’t rely on talk tracks 100%
Inexperienced reps can get stuck with outlier conversations since the script does not have an ‘answer’
Table highlighting key differences between talk tracks and call scripts.
Framework to build talk tracks that win
Listen to your customer calls/ user research Good talk tracks rely on ground data and not on assumptions. The first step is to listen to your team’s calls with prospects, users, and other stakeholders. These calls will help you spot emerging patterns of objections, comments, and feedback from both successful and unsuccessful calls. If you are not already recording and transcribing your customer-facing conversations and syncing with your CRM, you lack the foundation piece for building a successful talk track.
Incorporate learning from step 1 and build a draft Once you have reviewed conversation feedback, build talk tracks that address pain points unearthed from step 1. Bucket pain points in broader categories such as budget, features, authority, and competitors. When you can bucket the issues and discussions discovered in step 1 into a set of issue categories, write down conversation cues that will help reps handle each of those categories in a real call. Take care to pre-empt questions or concerns a prospect may have while discussing your product, and also add questions that will help reps understand the prospects’ concerns. Here’s a step-by-step video of how you can use insights from Rafiki to build data-backed talk tracks.
Build talk tracks that win with Rafiki’s conversation intelligence
Discuss with your team and iterate but leave room for personalization Once you have a talk track draft built, discuss it with your team and iterate it a couple more times. Don’t get to the specifics and leave some room for the reps to take control when they see fit. The key is to find an optimal middle ground between reps ‘winging it’ and following a rule book. The talk tracks must have buy-in from your team and are adopting it on their calls, or else the whole exercise is useless.
Coach your team with a conversation intelligence platform to perform with the talk tracks Don’t just rely on dry runs to coach. Monitor how reps are performing with the talk tracks on their customer calls. Actively review their conversation metrics such as talk-listen ratio, interactivity, question rate, sequence of topics discussed, and duration of each conversation topic discussed to understand the quality of their conversation and how that impacts their win rates. Appreciate when they do well with the talk track and give feedback when you feel they could improve something. Continuous training improves net sales per employee by 50%. Again, it is futile to rely on subjective opinions to build a robust talk track strategy – a conversation intelligence platform is a must-have to coach your team to be winners.
Improve the talk tracks continuously and don’t ignore follow-ups While getting out a successful talk track that is winning you demos and subsequent deals is commendable, the dynamics of your market can change in a snap. Also, having talk tracks or email templates ready for following-up post meetings is critical to retaining prospects’ interest and seeing through the deal until closing. Only 1 in 4 demos result in a conversion. A deal failing one step away from purchase is still a LOST DEAL.
Potholes to avoid while building sales talk tracks
Feature-dumping
Making talk tracks about features and product-specific jargon without leaving space to assess prospect needs or interest is detrimental to the objective of talk tracks. The idea is to communicate value organically with use-cases as the foundation, not product engineering.
Information overloading
Considering your reps have done solid prospecting, the talk tracks should tie value to prospects’ needs. Talking about multiple features to any prospect who has come looking for a niche functionality to solve their business problem may come off as bragging and hinder purchase decisions.
Not having a call to action
Talk tracks should incorporate a call to action for both reps and customers. Whether it is setting up the next meeting, sharing collateral, or following up, if talk tracks do not contain a call to action, the purpose of creating them is defeated. The goal is for sales reps to take control of the conversation and steer the conversation to closing.
Relying on opinions and not ground-reality
Talk tracks must be built on thorough research, data, and collaboration – not on hear-say! With plenty of conversation intelligence tools available in the market and tools such as Rafiki bringing conversation and revenue intelligence to affordable prices, not investing in such a solution is similar to handicapping yourself in a business context.
How Rafiki can help you build adaptive talk tracks
Rafiki helps you understand the ground reality of your customer conversations. It alerts you for deal risks such as competitor mentions, ghosted accounts, single-threaded conversations, and more so you can take corrective action and never miss a winnable deal. Unlike traditional conversation intelligence solutions that stop at demo analysis, Rafiki helps you contextually follow up with prospects post-demo, and ensure that your deals close.
Conversation intelligence given by Rafiki
You can build successful talk tracks by leveraging Rafiki’s AI-generated topic tracks for each meeting to ensure your reps are saying the right things at the right time.
With Rafiki’s topic search across meetings, notes, deals, and emails, you can spot emerging patterns, tweak your talk tracks, and stay ahead of the curve.
Get Rafiki today and build deal-winning talk tracks in days, not months! Want to know more about how you can leverage customer conversations to win more deals? Reach us at sales@getrafiki.ai for a free consultation with our sales experts.
