How Arco Improved Sales Using Conversation Intelligence
During the pandemic, sales managers in all industries have faced time constraints, reduced visibility into seller activity, and hybrid work environments that make personalized coaching even more difficult than it was before.
See how Sales Performance Coach Ethan-Jak Anderson at Arco, the United Kingdom’s only integrated safety services and products business, used Allego’s Conversation Intelligence to overcome these challenges and raise team performance.
“In a 7-week period, we improved our ‘offer rate’ (product mentions per call) by 75%, adding an additional eleven sales per day to the bottom line. Allego has helped us measure and track this metric.” — Ethan-Jak Anderson, Arco
As the country’s leading safety experts, Arco has over 135 years of experience helping companies identify, monitor, and reduce the risk associated with workplace hazards.The company offers personal protective equipment (PPE), clothing, footwear, workplace safety, and materials handling expertise.
Arco’s sales team of 30-strong outbound reps faced a number of challenges. Each of Arco’s agents makes around 100 calls per day to maintain regular contact with customers. Monitoring what reps say to customers was almost impossible. Arco’s dialing system had cloud storage for storing calls, but no central repository for accessing them easily. Lastly, although coaching plays a vital role in helping the team improve, trying to detect coachable moments was a laborious process.
7 Ways Arco Improved Sales Performance with Conversation Intelligence
Arco selected Allego’s Conversation Intelligence tool to improve visibility, consistency, and performance. Conversation Intelligence uses artificial intelligence (AI) to record, transcribe, and analyze sales calls to generate recommendations—powering every aspect of sales enablement with data-driven insights into performance.
With access to data from Conversation Intelligence, Arco’s Sales Performance Coach Ethan-Jak Anderson could quickly and seamlessly pinpoint learning moments during rep calls. This had an immediate impact on increasing the effectiveness of coaching sessions.
Here are seven benefits of Conversation Intelligence for Arco.
1. Time Savings
Allego’s platform cut the time it took Anderson to prepare recordings for coaching sessions in half. Not only could he understand the context of the call, but also the details of what was discussed and pinpoint moments of interest. Calls could be broken down further by specific keywords or phrases, ultimately giving Arco’s coach time back from manually scrolling through recordings so he could focus on training more new hires.
2. Better Visibility
Using Conversation Intelligence, Arco has been able to detect things they would never have
been able to see when manually analyzing call recordings. For Arco’s coach specifically, that consisted of things like the number of questions a sales agent asks, the pace of their conversation and the stock phrases they use all too often. Having this kind of data added substance to coaching conversations, allowing Anderson to target specifics so he could course correct on the details.
3. Greater Accountability
Conversation Intelligence enables reps to take charge of their own development—and at Arco, that’s exactly what happened. During spare moments, agents would visit Allego to listen to
their calls and review their team’s best performers’ calls. They could quickly discover what they were doing well, and what needed work.
4. Better Conversations
Allego’s tool helped Arco understand what good looks like in a way that was impossible before. Anderson discovered that agents only talked about the company’s products in 55% of their calls. It was clear that to sell more products, the team would have to get this number up. Leveraging Allego enabled Arco to role play scenarios on opportunities to introduce products. It only took seven weeks for that figure to reach 98%, adding an average of eleven new deals a day.
Allego’s Conversation Intelligence also provided Arco with the insight that, on average, an agent
would ask three questions on a call. But for top performers, that number was five. Now, the team and their coach have a best practice to aim for.
5. More Success Reaching Decision-Makers
At Arco, one of the key metrics is Right Party Contact (or RPC). It’s a percentage showing the team’s proportion of calls to decision-makers out of the total number of calls. Conversation Intelligence allowed Anderson to identify the key skills Arco’s agents needed to make better introductions on their calls, so decision-makers would be more likely to have a conversation rather than hang up. The RPC figure moved from 13.6% to 16%, meaning each agent spoke to two more decision-makers every day.
6. Stronger Team Building
During the pandemic, Arco’s outbound team worked remotely, so agents couldn’t overhear their colleagues’ conversations and pick up tips on what approaches worked well with customers. Allego enabled Arco’s agents to learn from each other and feel connected to the team, even when they were working from home.
7. More Fun
Conversation Intelligence increased the effectiveness of Arco’s coaching sessions and powered increased performance in the field. But Anderson also used Allego to deliver gamified quizzes to support ongoing reinforcement. Agents had to guess how many times they said ‘Awesome!’ or ‘Downhill to the weekend!’ over the course of the week. The team even had to guess which rep said ‘I really love my job’ directly to a customer!
The quiz encouraged agents to go on the Allego platform and discover what phrases they unknowingly said all the time—then challenge themselves to stop saying them. As well as being great fun, it meant their sales conversations became more focused, resulting in higher engagement and better numbers for Arco.
Learn More
Download The Complete Guide to Conversation Intelligence to learn how to understand rep performance and enable a winning team.
