Written by Sam Selldorff | Truly
This guest post comes from Truly, an enterprise voice platform for sales, account management, and customer success teams.
We are halfway through 2018 and every c-level executive has AI on the brain. The questions range from “what really is AI?” to managing the externalities of automating away jobs.
Although no one knows what a future with AI fully looks like, it is undeniable that we are fast approaching it.
In a future where AI is a commodity, competitive advantages will go to the company that has the most usable data. Smart sales leaders are figuring out how to capture conversation data right now to set themselves up to win when the AI revolution strikes.
All that being said, sales teams still need to stay focused on hitting quota today and avoid getting too caught up in the future. So, how do sales teams make conversation intelligence a priority today? The answer is simple. Implement a call recording strategy for call coaching. It drives real results today while also setting your company up for long term success
Where Do You Start?
These are the two most important questions your company needs to be able to answer today about call recording:
How does your organization get immediate ROI from a call recording program?
What are the risks and how do you mitigate them?
Showing Immediate ROI
Here are the top 5 ways call recording programs drive results for sales and support teams.
1. Saving Time for Managers
If your managers are responsible for listening to their reps’ calls (which they should be), save them time by giving them the ability to listen to as many calls as they want, at any time, with the ability to fast-forward, replay, and pause. Your managers will gain deep insight into their reps are performing in mere hours rather than months. Call recordings make coaching your reps as easy as listening to a podcast.
Key Metrics: Time spent coaching, # of calls listened to
2. Increase Team Accountability
When a rep updates you on a deal status or changes a forecast, they now have evidence to back up their claim. Call recordings allow reps and managers to get on the same page quickly and provide more accurate forecasting. Nothing gets lost in translation when managers can hear possible deal blockers from the horse’s mouth.
Key Metrics: Mean Percentage Error in forecast accuracy
3. Promotes a Better, More Personalized Customer Experience
As a prospect, there is nothing more annoying than feeling as if your rep isn’t listening. Reps provide the best buyer experience when they are deeply informed on their prospect’s specific business case. Call recordings give your reps listening super powers so that they can be prepared for every follow up conversation with the exact right context and understanding.
Key Metrics: # of recording listens, follow-up response rate
4. Kick Bad Conversation Habits
Something as simple as getting rid of filler words can entirely change how engaged a prospect is in your conversation. You need to hear yourself speak to realize what bad communication habits are getting in the way of connecting with your prospects and customers.
Key Metrics: Talk time, filler word frequency
5. Improve Hand-Off Efficacy
The B2B sales cycle has multiple people involved in a buying decision, both from the buyer and the seller side. Each stage of the deal cycle involves a different mix of stakeholders, reps, account managers, customer success managers, and support folks. Sometimes at deal even involves solution engineers, your legal team, or the c-suite. Providing every person involved with accurate deal context avoids a bad game of telephone where critical information gets lost. Call recordings provide the most accurate historical information on the deal.
Key Metrics: Hand-off efficiency, Churn %, Deal cycle length
Managing Risk: What to Look Out For & How to Solve It
The Challenge: Compliance with local and federal legislation on capturing customer data, recording conversations, and making sales phone calls is constantly changing.
Solution: Have IT and Legal partner with your phone system vendor (or call recording tool of choice). Your provider should be able to put in place custom controls and automation to make sure no call is ever recorded illegally. If they can’t, it is time to look for a new phone vendor.
The Challenge: Adoption. If none of your reps record calls, you will not see immediate benefits.
Solution: Adoption issues ring true for almost every sales ops person who has ever tried to implement a new tool or process. The best solution here is to make it impossible not to record calls (legally). Use automation and remove any friction from the process. This even works for managers. For example, sending an automated email digest of key calls to listen to at the end of each week. Make sure your tools automate away adoption problems and provide quick time to value for users.
The Challenge: Cluttering your CRM with useless information. More data in your CRM isn’t necessarily always better. You need to have clean data in the right place so that it is usable and doesn’t add noise.
Solution: Select a tool that works within your organization’s existing data management system, not on top or outside of it. For most companies this is Salesforce (and more specifically existing custom fields). You will know if it works because you can easily plug call recording and tracking data into your existing dashboard to report on simple but meaningful conversation attributes (ex: talk time, call velocity, number of touches, etc.). Make sure your call recording system is set up to be easily usable from day one, so you can catch when junky data starts to enter your CRM (or worse, when no data goes in at all).
Excited about making call recording work? Check out how Truly makes call recording programs successful and works with IT teams to mitigate company specific risks.
