If your sales team operates mostly through calling, then you know how important each and every one of those phone calls is to your company’s success. Don’t leave something that holds so much value to chance!
Instead, you should record your sales calls to collect data that will prove its worth time and time again. How so? Here are three major ways: You’ll be able to review sales strategies for better success rates, gain customer insight to improve your marketing and products, and use sales call recordings for more effective onboarding.
1. Never miss a detail again
Sales calls can be exploratory events, therefore you are likely to have a mind racing with thoughts and potential next questions to ask. This is a strain on your brain – you have to think of a question to what the customer is saying, you have to make notes and be certain that you are keeping up with what they are saying.
That is a lot to ask of your brain, especially if you are going to do this multiple times throughout the day. Call recording provides you with information as well as a positive experience for the customer simply because:
- You are not asking them to repeat their responses and slowing down the flow you may have.
- If you missed a detail all you need to do is rewind and listen. No additional calls or emails are needed.
2. Review Sales Strategies to Improve Success Rate
To accurately see whether your sales strategies are 1) being followed and 2) actually working, you should rely on more than just the memory of what a call was like.
Regardless of how much you trust your team, it’s not easy for them to track or remember all of the small details of a call when they’re focused on making a sale. On your side, it can be inconvenient, not to mention inefficient, to base major business decisions on your impressions from hopping onto a few random calls.
When you record phone calls, you can perform a quality control check based on the primary data to ensure that your sales processes in place are in fact being adhered to. For example, maybe you find that sales reps with lower success rates are forgetting to bring up a crucial point.
You can also do a team-wide sales calls analysis to make global conclusions about what’s working and what’s not. Perhaps current sales tactics aren’t providing satisfactory responses to a specific prospect question anymore. Or maybe there’s a customer question that sales reps haven’t been trained on how to respond to at all. If you have someone who is far and away the best performer, you can also see what strategies they’re using that can be implemented elsewhere.
By reviewing and analyzing recorded sales calls you are able to:
- Know if the sales team are sticking to the guidelines in each conversation.
- Understand if the conversation is meaningful and focusing in on the clients problem areas, not just chit-chatting.
- Develop communications training to ensure the sales team have a point of reference but also hone their skills.
- Understand who handles tricky calls best and how it should be done.
- Notice the top performing sales people and understand what makes them that way, use this in future training.
3. Gain Data to Inform Marketing Decisions
Your marketing team might have significant insight into how your target consumer thinks and what they want, but you can build on that knowledge with more information from the source itself. Sales calls can reveal exactly what consumers are looking for as well as any hesitations they might have about moving forward with your product or service.
When you know what interests your target consumer the most, you can devote more time and energy into marketing campaigns based on that idea. On the flip side, when you know what’s worrying your consumer, you can tackle that head-on in your marketing so it’s a non-issue from the get-go and one less roadblock in the way of a conversion.
Sales call recordings can also be another way to conduct product research, so you should make that information available outside of just your sales and marketing teams. You may find that customers’ questions and pain points spark ideas on how to tweak or improve not just your marketing message, but the product or service itself so that it becomes more attractive.
4. Train New Sales Team Members
It’s essential to train new members of your sales team about your company’s messaging and sales tactics so they can represent your business well and succeed by converting leads. While handbooks and guidelines can offer good overviews of what they’ll be doing, it’s hard to beat the learning experience of reviewing real-life cases.
From your bank of recorded sales calls, you can pinpoint specific case studies to teach your new salespeople about the success or failure of certain strategies. By listening to these calls, they can become better prepared for what they might actually face in the field.
Even after training, the call recordings can be used as a resource for how to handle different situations. For example, if you happen to go with CallTap as the phone call recording app for your sales calls, you’ll also have access to automated transcriptions so you can easily take notes on tactics used throughout the call. Then, you can import these into Google Docs so the whole team can view and annotate them.
5. Find customer stories and testimonials
Collecting positive messages that can be shared with the rest of the team is just as useful and vital as collecting bad calls. When it comes to customer stories, what is said and heard can be a little bigger than what is true. This is normal, there’s a lot endorphins racing around so we pick things up and miss things too.
Recording a customer story means you can play it back to your team and they can hear it in it’s raw form. Plus with a customer story call recording you can:
- Go back through and pick up any additional pointers that may have been missed. You never know there could be some real positive gems in there.
- Use direct quotes rather than over-the-top versions which could sound a little unbelievable when read out loud or out of context.
6. Easy dispute resolution
Sometimes sales people give away offers or make promises, all with good intention, that can get missed in the email chain or during conversation. That discount offered was only for the first 3 months but the customer might have understood it as 6 months.
What do you do in that situation? Especially if it is just not financially plausible to give this discount at that rate. Most cases, without proof and the customer being right, the discount is giving and you buckle up. However, recorded calls can mitigate that situation from occurring and save a lot of stress and headaches in the long run.
So with a call recording you are now able to:
- Ensure the customer hears the evidence and does not feel cheated.
- Your reputation so positive and cannot be hurt from bad PR.
Introducing Call Recordings to Your Sales Team
Before you march ahead with your phone recordings, it’s essential that you first check whether recording sales calls is legal in your country and state. Different areas vary widely in what they allow, and you want to be sure you’re compliant with all rules, including call recording disclaimers, before proceeding.
Once you know you’re in the clear, it’s time to handle things with your sales team. When you’re introducing the idea of recording calls, you might be met with some apprehension. No matter how good they are at their job, it can be nerve-wracking for your salespeople to know that what they say is not just being monitored but kept on file.
To ensure a smooth transition, emphasize how it’s not a matter of distrust, lack of performance, or micro-managing. Instead, focus on how you’re implementing the process so you can work together as a team to help improve their sales skills, and make more money as a result.
Since you’ll be revisiting sales calls at a later point with a cool head, you’ll be able to step back and more clearly see what worked well and not so well. If there are any concerns, you can cite specific evidence from the recordings to help convince team members of what needs to be improved.
Remember though, don’t just focus on what went wrong when discussing the findings of your sales call recordings with your team. Give praise about best practices, too! To put it simply, the best way to record sales calls with your team is to do so in an environment based on learning and a mutual desire to be more successful.
Turn Your Findings into Financial Gains
By using a call recording app like CallTap to make sales call recordings, your sales team can learn from their mistakes to close more deals, you can further tailor your marketing to draw in more consumers, and you can improve your product design to attract more leads.
All of these adjustments translate to more bucks for your business. Start recording your sales calls so you don’t miss out on that literal wealth of data and potential revenue out there!