Levelling up a time-tested sales technique with AI-powered Real-Time Guidance from Balto
The Challenge
Getting Discovery Questions Right on Every Single Call Was Almost Impossible
Discovery questions are probably the sales tactic we can all get behind. They position your reps as experts, let them pitch the best possible product, and set them up to close sales every day.
But when reps are taking hundreds of calls every week, just joined your team, or are under pressure to meet sales goals, they can forget to ask those critical discovery questions.
National General Insurance sales reps used to be in this situation. Reps had to rely on printed checklists and handwritten sticky notes to get discovery questions right on every single call. But rummaging through notes while on the phone with a prospect doesn’t make for a great discovery — or help close the sale. So, National General decided it was time for a change.
National General is no stranger to using technology to fill these kinds of gaps. But most of those solutions caught mistakes after the fact, when discovery was already over and, oftentimes, not done well.
The sales team knew they needed a tool that would do two things:
- Remind reps in real-time to use the discovery questions in their checklists.
- Allow managers to update the questions easily and at scale.
The Solution
A quick test with a proven AI solution
Fortunately, National General had already adopted Balto’s Real-Time Guidance into other teams. The sales team saw how other reps were benefiting from getting guidance on live calls and believed this was the tool they needed.
Specifically, they saw how they could use Balto’s Smart Checklist to remind reps to use the right discovery questions on every call instead of reading off a printed paper or a sticky note.
After just a few days of training, the sales reps were using Real-Time Guidance to always ask the best questions on every call. Managers could see when reps missed sections of the checklist, and which discovery questions had the highest impact on closing the sale. They fine-tuned whenever they needed to, and changes were live for all agents at the push of a button.
To prove the ROI, the Balto team set up an A/B test between two groups of reps. Group A used Smart Checklists to ask better discovery questions, while Group B stuck with printed checklists. Reps were equally distributed to account for experience and tenure.
The Results
16% More Sales After 14 Weeks of Excellent Discovery Questions
After just 14 weeks, the results were clear. Group A using Smart Checklists was closing 16% more sales than their associates. Scaled out to every rep, the total number of additional annual revenue translated to tens of millions.
All from asking the best discovery questions on every call.
Check out how National General’s Claims team also cut AHT using Real-Time.
