Conversation Intelligence For B2B Revenue

Forrester found that coaching is the only capability in this category that every single reference customer had adopted.

It is also the capability they rated least valuable.

That combination is unusual enough to stop on. Universal adoption normally indicates that something works. Here it indicates the opposite, and Forrester's explanation is the sharpest diagnosis available of why conversation intelligence deployments underdeliver: most companies use these tools only to record and listen to calls, which creates more work for managers and sellers rather than less.

The technology captures everything. The organisation then has to find time to listen to it.

What conversation intelligence is

Forrester defines conversation intelligence for B2B revenue as tools using natural language processing to capture unstructured data from spoken, written, and video conversation channels between buying and selling groups, with embedded AI analysing that data and surfacing insights to guide representatives toward best practice, inform coaching and enablement, and support decision-making.

Three phrases in that definition do real work.

Between buying and selling groups, not between a rep and a lead. The unit of analysis is a deal involving multiple people on both sides.

Spoken, written, and video. This is not call recording. It spans meetings, email, and messaging, which is the difference between a transcript archive and a picture of a relationship.

And surfaces insights, which is the promise the category has struggled to deliver against, for the reason described above.

The market emerged around 2015 and expanded sharply in 2020 when the pandemic removed in-person meetings and every sales conversation became a recordable digital event. Forrester notes it has traction in high tech and lags in traditional industries, which is worth remembering when reading adoption statistics that draw heavily on software companies selling to software companies.

Why the coaching finding matters

Consider what a CI deployment actually asks of a sales manager.

Before, that manager coached by joining a handful of calls, hearing what they heard, and giving feedback based on partial evidence and experience. Imperfect, and bounded by the hours in a week.

After, every call is recorded, transcribed, scored, and searchable. The manager now has access to a hundred times more evidence and exactly the same amount of time.

If the tool surfaces the two moments in a forty-minute call that a rep should hear, and the pattern across a quarter that explains why deals stall at security review, the manager is better off. If it produces a library of recordings with a search box, the manager is worse off, because the expectation has risen and the capacity has not.

The second outcome is the common one, and it is not a product failure so much as a deployment failure. Organisations buy the recording and never build the practice around what to do with it.

There is a related dynamic worth naming. Recording every seller conversation changes the relationship between a rep and their manager whether or not anyone intends it to. A tool sold as coaching support is experienced as surveillance if the only visible use is retrospective review of what someone said wrong. Adoption suffers in ways that show up as complaints about the interface.

Inside The Forrester Wave: Conversation Intelligence For B2B Revenue, Q4 2023

Published on 25 October 2023 and authored by Seth Marrs, the evaluation scored twelve providers against twenty five criteria across current offering, strategy, and market presence.

Gong was the only Leader, taking the highest score of any vendor in both the current offering and strategy categories.

A single Leader in a twelve-vendor evaluation is rare. Most Waves in this series name three, four, or five. One vendor sweeping both scored dimensions describes a market with a clear technical frontrunner rather than a field of comparable options, which is itself the most useful thing a buyer can know before running a process.

Clari placed as a Strong Performer, positioned by Forrester for companies wanting enterprise deal management that includes real-time conversation intelligence, with reference customers emphasising value for money.

Zoom also placed as a Strong Performer with Revenue Accelerator. Forrester's assessment noted it began as an entry point to Zoom's AI capabilities and developed quickly, crediting the innovation pedigree and funding to become top tier, while observing that its roadmap had been aimed at catching up to what already existed in the market.

Forrester's companion Landscape, published in Q2 2023, mapped twenty one vendors, which tells you the scored twelve are the top of a considerably wider field.

Forrester's stated position on the category's importance was unambiguous: conversation intelligence tools would be the most important AI investment for sales organisations.

Two products under one label

The most practically useful thing in Forrester's guidance is the observation that CI vendors innovate toward one of two use cases, and that buyers should match the vendor's focus to their own priority.

Deal insights is the first. What is actually happening in this opportunity? Which competitors were mentioned? Did the economic buyer appear on any call? What objections recur? Is this deal progressing or has it gone quiet in a way the CRM does not reflect? The consumer is a revenue leader forecasting, and the value is accuracy about the pipeline.

Sales readiness is the second. How good is this rep, specifically? Where does their discovery break down? Which behaviours separate the top quartile? What should onboarding emphasise? The consumer is a sales manager or enablement function, and the value is capability building.

These sound adjacent and they produce different products. A deal insights platform optimises for aggregation across conversations and integration with the forecast. A readiness platform optimises for the individual call, the scorecard, the comparison against a methodology, and the workflow that gets a rep to watch the right sixty seconds.

Clari's positioning as deal management with real-time CI attached is the clearest example of the first. Gong's position across both is what a market frontrunner looks like.

The failure mode is buying for one and being sold the other, which is easy because every vendor demonstrates both.

Consent is not a footnote in Europe

Recording customer conversations at scale carries requirements that vary sharply by jurisdiction, and the category's centre of gravity in US software companies means this often gets discovered late by European teams.

Under GDPR, a recorded call containing identifiable individuals is personal data, and processing it needs a lawful basis, a retention period, and a response to any subject access request that follows. Several European jurisdictions apply additional national rules on recording communications, and consent requirements differ between them. Employee-side recording brings works council consultation into scope in several countries, including in the Netherlands and Germany, because monitoring employee performance is a distinct category of processing.

The practical consequence for a revenue operations function is that the deployment has more stakeholders than the buying committee assumed. Legal, privacy, and in several markets employee representatives all have a legitimate position, and discovering that after signature adds quarters rather than weeks.

None of this is an argument against the category. It is an argument for scoping the jurisdictional question at the start, because the answer determines whether you can record at all in some markets, and whether transcripts can cross borders in others.

Being absorbed

The structural pressure on this category is visible in the vendor list rather than in the analysis.

Clari appears in this evaluation as a Strong Performer, and separately in Forrester's revenue operations and intelligence, sales engagement, and revenue orchestration categories. Zoom arrived here from web conferencing, having built CI onto the platform where the conversations already happen.

Two directions of absorption, both logical.

The revenue platforms want CI because conversation data is the highest-fidelity signal about a deal, and a forecast built on rep-entered CRM fields is a forecast built on optimism. Adding CI improves the core product.

The communications platforms want CI because they already hold the recording, the transcript, and the participant list. Adding analysis is incremental for them and expensive for anyone who has to integrate.

That leaves the specialists competing on depth of analysis against companies competing on proximity to the data. Gong's position at the top of this evaluation says depth still wins on capability. Whether it wins on purchasing decisions is a different question, and the answer usually depends on what else the organisation is already paying for.

What changes when the AI is in the room

The evaluation described here scored a market built on retrospective analysis. Something happened, it was recorded, and the system explained it afterwards.

The direction of travel is toward participation. Real-time guidance during a call, which Clari's positioning already references. Agents that attend meetings, produce the summary, update the CRM, and draft the follow-up without a human touching it. Eventually, systems that flag the missing stakeholder or the unaddressed objection while there is still time to act.

That shift changes the coaching paradox rather than resolving it. Retrospective coaching created work because someone had to review. Real-time guidance removes the review step and replaces it with a different problem: a rep being prompted mid-conversation is a rep dividing attention between the customer and the software.

It also raises the disclosure question sharply. A recorded call that a customer consented to is one thing. A call where an AI is analysing the customer's speech in real time and coaching the seller on how to respond is a different proposition, and the consent language most organisations use today was not written for it.

The category's founding insight remains correct. Sales conversations are the richest data an organisation has about its own revenue, and they were, until recently, entirely unexamined. What the last decade demonstrated is that capturing that data is the easy part, and that the value depends almost entirely on whether anyone changes their behaviour as a result.

Forrester's reference customers answered that question clearly. They all adopted coaching. It helped least. The gap between those two facts is where the work actually is.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.