The voice of the customer is a critically important business asset. It can help inform every aspect of your business — all the way from how you get leads, how you win or lose deals, what customers need post-sale and how the industry is shaping up.

These are real-world practitioners and buyers who’re voicing their opinion to your sales, marketing, SDR, customer success team every day.

And yet, most marketers I know still seek market feedback and opinion using time-consuming and costly methods like 1-1 meetings/ interviews, events, and focus groups.

What makes these methods even more difficult is that customer relationships are never owned by marketing. As a result, you’re seeking introductions from other team members who have more pressing matters to attend to.

The introduction of Conversation Intelligence significantly changed how we capture and use the voice of the customer internally. Every conversation with a client is now recorded, transcribed, and made available for search and analysis. 

Not enough marketers leverage this vital asset to learn what language works best and how to better engage interested prospects. With access to conversation intelligence, your Go To Market (GTM) team should be able to get relevant personas interested, move prospects through the funnel faster, and deliver great buying experiences.

In this article, I’ll show you four ways in which marketing can leverage the voice of the customer.

Write better demand gen copy

Understanding the customer journey — why and how someone decides to interact with your brand — is crucial to sales and marketing success.

So how can you recreate that same path to your door? Uncover why a viable prospect reached out and how they found you in the first place.

Did the prospect learn about you because a peer at another firm uses your product and recommended it? Did they read your blog after seeing a digital ad served up online?

Maybe it was a piece of marketing collateral they picked up at a trade show or the result of an executive speaking at an event. Do you know what message or asset was the magnet that attracted the potential customer?

The easiest way to get to this information quickly is to replay critical moments from the initial meetings a customer has with your SDRs or sales reps. Identify the scenario that brought the prospect in and double down on the methods that seem to resonate most with them. Re-write your emails, subject lines, ad copies using the terms that prospects use most frequently to express their goals and challenges.

Content marketers also find value in call recordings. The added transparency into a client’s pain points or what they’re struggling with, allows the content marketing team to tailor the topics of their ebooks, blog posts, or whitepaper to deliver actionable insights and key takeaways that can help move prospects through the funnel.

Make more effective product marketing collateral

One of the key areas where marketing and sales overlap is the sales enablement content that product marketing creates. Very often product marketers write these collaterals based on product knowledge (inward-out method) rather than leveraging the language of the customer (an outward-in method). 

Further reading: [Infographic] Sales decks or demos – which one to use and when

Prospects and customers are going to provide feedback. We know they love to. So, when they talk about your pricing, features, or raise objections, the product marketing team should be listening. They should be able to find trends and commonalities across what different personas say at different stages of the buying journey. 

Then the process of creating world-class product marketing content becomes an easy job. In Abe Lincoln’s ax-sharpening metaphor, listening to call recordings would be the sharpening of your ax.

Enable SDRs, Sales Reps, Customer Success/Support with the right talk tracks

Access to customer and prospect conversations also helps marketing train and coach sales reps, SDRs, and customer success on the right talk tracks they should be using. They can listen to recordings and provide feedback, which can help improve the skills of the sales rep. Here’s an example of how Kat Nemmers, one of our top reps, collaborates with product marketing.

Not only can marketing confirm reps are applying what they learned in training after a new sales pitch or feature is rolled out, but they can also capture how customers respond to them. This helps improve the quality of your talk tracks with time.

Through tracking and analysis of sales calls, you can also alert sales leaders and coaches to reps who might need more help on when and how to use certain assets and messages in customer conversations. You may even identify an opportunity for the entire sales team to take a different approach e.g. how to talk about a specific competitor.

Drive market feedback to the product strategy and roadmap

Feedback from a call can help marketers understand what the customer wants in that product. Product marketers can gauge the features customers are looking for and what’s being said about competitors.

This helps product marketing work more collaboratively with product management to align the roadmap with market expectations and realities.

Imagine a product beta launch process a few years back. PMs and PMMs would have to join multiple calls with account managers and quiz customers on their experience. Now this feedback can be captured as part of a regular check-in with the client and shared with the beta team who can revise these 5-10 minute snippets across 10 different customers in a matter of a few minutes (listen at 2x speed!).

Our CEO, Roy, calls marketing the “tip of the spear”. The sharper we are, the more effective the rest of the organization will be.

Conversation Intelligence has several applications for the sales team — faster onboarding, better skill coaching, deal reviews, and opportunity management. But it also captures and surfaces market intelligence in a very effective manner. It’s time for marketing and product teams to become the most adept power users of conversation intelligence in a company.  

Author: Parth Mukherjee, Head of Product Marketing at Chorus.ai, the #1 Conversation Intelligence platform for high-growth sales teams.