Conversations with prospects and customers are the best way to learn about their needs, pain points, current trends & behavioral patterns, and more. But more often than not, this information isn’t captured properly and valuable insights slip through the cracks, leading to missed opportunities.

On top of that, most B2B organizations rely on a patchwork of tools to capture customer interactions across calls and meetings. For example: Reps may use one platform to schedule meetings and another for note-taking and transcription. This further leads to fragmented workflows and siloed data, making it harder to extract valuable insights.

Enter conversation intelligence software.

A conversation intelligence software can record, transcribe, and analyze conversations across calls, meetings, and social media channels to generate actionable, real-time insights. It offers complete visibility across conversations, helping you improve deal outcomes, enhance team performance, and drive organizational growth.

In this blog post, we list 5 best conversation intelligence platforms for sales teams. Whether you’re an early-stage organization, mid-market or SMB, or an enterprise team, we have a recommendation (or two) for you in each category. Let’s get started!

Factors to consider before choosing a conversation intelligence software

While selecting a conversation intelligence tool, consider these four key areas to ensure the tool delivers practical value for your business:

Ease of use

Great UI/UX makes all the difference. One of the key things to consider when looking for conversation intelligence software is that it should be intuitive and easy to use. The platform should offer little to minimal learning curve and a visually appealing UI/UX, making it a breeze to use. 

Here are a couple of observations to make when using the software for the first time:

• Is the platform easy to navigate?
• Do you require someone to set up and configure the platform?
• Do you need a dedicated admin for training and onboarding?
• Is the adoption easy for your team?

Product capabilities

Each conversation intelligence software excels in different areas. Some might provide excellent meeting automation, revenue enablement features, while others offer advanced coaching or forecasting capabilities. 

While choosing a conversation intelligence tool, evaluate your use case and match it to the product capabilities the tool offers. From there on, you can dive into more granular details and shortlist tools that align more closely with your needs. 

Integrations

Ensure the CI tools you’re evaluating integrate with your current tech stack. What CRM does your sales team use? Do they also use collaboration and project management apps? Look for native integrations to ensure seamless workflows.

Pricing

Pricing is another crucial factor to consider to ensure you get maximum ROI from using the platform. Here are a couple of questions to ask yourself:

• Does the platform offer a freemium version or at least a free trial?
• Does it require you to commit to an annual plan?
• What features does it offer in its free plan compared to others?
• Does it have a maximum cap regarding usage, hours, or users?
• What about the platform fee or add-on costs?

Top 5 conversation intelligence software for every type of sales team and use cases

Every sales team is different, and so are their needs. For this reason, we've shortlisted the five best conversation intelligence tools for early-stage or SMBs, mid-market, and enterprise sales teams.  Read on to learn more about our recommendations in each category:

Avoma - best for meeting automation, conversation analytics & AI-powered coaching, and pipeline management

Who should consider it?

SMBs, mid-market, and enterprise teams. 

Avoma is a conversation and revenue intelligence platform, enabling sales managers & leaders to automate their entire sales cycle. From scheduling meetings to recording and transcribing, generating AI-powered notes, extracting insights & automating coaching, and pipeline management & forecasting—Avoma does it all.

Dive deep into conversation insights with Avoma, analyzing metrics such as talk time, talk-to-listen ratio, filler words, longest monologues, and sentiments. What sets Avoma apart is the fully automated call scoring, giving managers 100% coverage for call coaching. You can leverage our pre-built scorecards based on popular sales methodologies such as BANT, MEDDIC, or SANDLER or create custom ones tailored to your unique business processes.

With Avoma, managers gain real-time, end-to-end visibility into the sales pipeline, enabling them to identify deal risks and opportunities, track buyer engagement across channels, and forecast with precision to hit their monthly and quarterly targets.

Here’s a quick rundown of Avoma’s core features

For SMBs

• Collaborative meeting agenda templates: Create and share meeting templates for different purposes. Avoma auto-inserts appropriate templates depending on the meeting type, enabling you to capture information consistently across the board.

• Customizable AI-generated notes:  Generate in-depth AI-powered notes automatically organized under custom topics such as key takeaways, business goals, pain points, action items, etc.

• Team collaboration features:  Drop time-stamped comments, tag members, and assign action items for effective, real-time collaboration.

• Automatic 2-way CRM sync:  Sync and merge customer records between the tool and the CRM, along with notes, transcripts, and other call details, to keep information up-to-date and relevant. 

For mid-market & enterprise companies

• Meeting scheduling & lead routing: Enable buyers to schedule meetings with reps with the inbound lead router. Customize scheduling pages based on purpose, availability, time zone, preferences, and more.

• Conversation insights & analytics: Capture speaker insights such as talk time, talk speed, patience levels, filler words, monologues, sentiments, and much more.

• Keyword & concept tracking: Track keywords and concepts across conversations and get notified in real-time via Slack or any other platform you use.

• AI-powered scorecards & call scoring: Use AI for sales to automatically score calls based on defined rules. Use pre-built customizable scorecards or create your own tailored to your specific needs.

• Pipeline management & forecasting: Get a complete overview of your pipeline, catch deal risks and trends, track buyer engagement across all channels, and forecast more accurately.

Jiminny - best conversation intelligence tool for sales playbooks & coaching

Who should consider it?

SMBs and mid-market B2B organizations

Jiminny is a great conversation intelligence tool for customer-facing teams with impressive coaching capabilities. It allows you to create your own coaching frameworks or use pre-built playbooks to assess reps’s performances. One of the standout features of Jiminny is live coaching, allowing managers to provide real-time guidance and feedback during calls. 

You can set up a call criteria and Jiminny automatically scores calls based on that. The only caveat here is that you need to configure themes, topics, and triggers and then set up scorecards before the tool can automatically start scoring calls. At present, Jimminy doesn’t offer pre-built scorecards based on common sales methodologies, such as BANT, MEDDIC, and SPICED.

Here’s a quick rundown of Jiminny’s core features

• Automatic CRM data entry: Sync all your call details along with notes and transcripts to CRM automatically.

• Sentiment analysis: Analyze customer sentiments and behaviors throughout the call to identify relevant patterns and trends.

• Call performance insights: Track reps’ performance across metrics such as talk-to-listen ratio, talking speed, longest monologues, conversation switches, etc.

• AI-powered call scoring & coaching:  Score reps based on your coaching frameworks or playbooks and provide live feedback to improve their performance. 

• Pipeline management & forecasting: Get account-level visibility into your pipeline, spot deal risks and new opportunities, and forecast accurately. 

Jiminny’s (current) limitations

• No meeting templates: Jiminny doesn’t allow you to customize notes for different meeting types, such as internal calls, demos, onboarding calls, and more. 

• No AI-generated follow-up emails: It cannot generate follow-up emails based on your previous interactions.

• No customizable AI scorecard templates: It lacks AI-powered scorecards based on common sales methodologies such as BANT, SPICED, and MEDDIC to automatically score calls. 

• Third-party integration challenges: Integrations with third-party apps aren’t seamless and often, the call details aren’t properly synced to the CRM. 

Grain - best conversation intelligence tool for meeting automation

Who should consider it?

Early-stage, SMBs, & bootstrapped B2B organizations

Grain is a great option for sales teams looking to completely automate meeting management. You can automatically record and transcribe sales calls, generate AI-powered notes, sync call details to the CRM, draft AI-powered follow-up emails, and a lot more.

The platform offers robust team collaboration features, allowing you to drop comments, tag members, create video highlights and playlists, and more. You can gain deeper insights into conversation analytics, track keywords & similar matches, and gain real-time visibility across key accounts, empowering your team to improve performance and close deals faster.

Here’s a quick rundown of Grain’s core features

• Meeting automation capabilities: Grain offers impressive AI meeting features such as creating highlights from a summary, AI titles, custom prompts, and reels and playlists.

• 2-way automatic CRM sync: Grain automatically enriches CRM fields whenever it detects changes to your transcripts or notes.

• Conversation metrics: Generate insights into conversation metrics such as reps’ talk-to-listen ratio, filler words, talking speed, patience levels, and longest monologues. 

• Keyword & topic tracking: Capture recurring topics and keywords across conversations to identify relevant trends and patterns.

• Deal insights & analytics: Get an overview of your pipeline, view deal status & activity, and track email engagement. 

Grain’s (current) limitations

• Lacks global search option: Grain doesn’t have a straightforward search option to retrieve call recordings/transcripts from the library. 

• Inferior meeting notes: Though Grain offers customizable templates for each meeting type, the notes captured are quite generic.

• Basic AI coaching features: Grain lacks significant coaching capabilities such as AI-powered scorecards & auto-call scoring that enable managers to review calls faster and provide coaching at scale. 

• Fewer integrations: It offers native integrations with only seven platforms, including CRMs, project management tools, and collaboration apps, which could be limiting for customer-facing teams. 

Clari - best conversation intelligence tool for pipeline management and forecasting

Who should consider it?

SMBs, mid-market, and enterprise teams

Clari combines conversation insights with powerful revenue intelligence capabilities. It can automatically transcribe and summarize calls, generate AI-powered summaries, extract conversation insights, automate coaching, and much more.

The platform’s true strength lies in pipeline inspection and revenue forecasting, empowering frontline managers to get complete visibility into their sales cycle and improve team performance. It provides real-time visualizations of deal health and risk indicators, tracks forecast changes, automates account engagement, and a lot more.

Here’s a quick rundown of Clari’s core features

• Pipeline inspection & management: Get complete visibility into the sales pipeline to meet your current and upcoming quarter targets.

• Predictive forecasting: Clari leverages AI to compare current sales performance against past performances and pipeline trends to generate accurate, reliable forecasts. 

• Sales analytics: Get real-time insights across accounts, sales activities, performance metrics, engagement, and more.

• Conversation intelligence features: Automatically record and transcribe calls, generate summaries, extract conversation insights, auto-update CRM, and more.

Clari’s (current) limitations

• Steep learning curve: Clari’s UI/UX is a bit clunky and can be hard to get around to. It can also be more challenging to deploy compared to other software in the market.

• Limited customization options: Clari’s data models are one-size-fits-all and cannot be customized per your unique business needs. 

• No AI-powered scorecards & call scoring: Clari lacks pre-built scorecards to automatically score calls based on defined criteria. 

• Native integration challenges: It can take hours to pull data from the CRM and the Salesforce integration doesn’t work that well.

Gong - a best-of-breed enterprise solution with conversation & revenue intelligence

Who should consider it?

Enterprise teams.

Gong is an ideal choice for enterprise teams, offering advanced conversation intelligence, sales engagement, deal analytics, and forecasting. 

The platform captures customer interactions across calls, meetings, and emails, allowing you to extract conversation insights, track keywords and concepts, and identify trends and behavioral patterns. You can generate a deep analysis of each call, pinpoint areas of improvement, and get AI-powered recommendations specific to each rep’s performance. 

Gong leverages 300+ unique signals to predict deal outcomes and forecast more accurately.  Using the platform, you can effortlessly track quota attainment, rep performance, coverage, pipeline movement, and much more.  

Here’s a quick rundown of Gong’s core features

• Sales engagement features: Streamline workflows with centralized account management, task prioritization, email sequences, and AI-powered insights sent directly to the CRM.

• Conversation intelligence features: Capture insights across customer interactions, track keywords & concepts, generate automatic email follow-ups, and automate CRM data entry.

• AI-powered sales coaching: Track key metrics such as topic duration, question ratio, and talk ratio, identify areas of improvement, and generate personalized AI-powered recommendations for each rep. 

• Pipeline management & forecasting: Get real-time visibility into the pipeline, spot risks and opportunities, personalize account management, and generate reliable forecasts.

Gong’s (current) limitations

• Prohibitively expensive: Clapp.io reported earlier that Gong’s pricing varies anywhere between $1,050-1600 depending on the type of seat. You need to commit to an annual or multi-year contract—and there’s no monthly subscription option. There is also a $7,500 professional services fee and a one-time platform fee that starts from $5000 and goes up to $50,000.

• No customized AI-generated notes: Gong doesn’t let you customize or edit AI-powered meeting notes as per your call type or purpose. 

• Lacks AI-powered call scoring: Gong doesn’t automatically score calls based on your scorecards, which means managers need to manually listen and review each call.

• No 2-way automatic CRM sync: Gong doesn’t offer 2-way automatic CRM sync and lacks native integration with Pipedrive.

To conclude: Which conversation intelligence platform should you choose?

Ultimately, deciding which conversation intelligence platform to choose depends on your business type, goals, and team size. If you need basic meeting automation capabilities, then look at Grain. For conversation intelligence and coaching capabilities, both Jiminny and Gong are great options. But if your use case is geared towards pipeline management & forecasting, then Clari would be an ideal option for you. 

Avoma combines the best of all platforms, streamlining meeting management, generating in-depth conversation insights, automating coaching with AI-powered scorecards & scoring, and providing real-time visibility into sales pipeline & forecasting. 

If you prefer an all-in-one platform rather than juggling multiple tools, then check out Avoma. Sign up for a free trial here or book a demo with our sales team.