Written by Jason Smith｜IO Education
Every day your Sales Development Team is making proactive outbound sales calls. Or at least they should be. Here are 2 questions you should be asking yourself.
- How often are all of the components of a great call present in my team’s phone effort?
- Is it worth a part of my day / sales tool stack to ensure every outbound call contains those valuable components?
Regardless of how you answer the first question, the answer to the second question should be emphatically yes.
As the Sales Development Team Manager at IO Education it’s my passion to hire aspiring sales professionals right out college or early in their career to systematically coach them into new business hunting heroes.
Here’s a conversation you’ve likely had far too often with members on your sales time. “Hey Kyle – How’d that call go with XYZ group?” “It went great! They loved the potential and we really had great connection. At this point I’m just waiting to hear back from them about how big the deal is going to be.”
You’re probably waiting for Kyle to give you the answers to all of the important questions you shouldn’t have to ask like: What was the role of the person you spoke with? Does he or she have any authority in making a decision regarding our solution? Did you identify any other key stakeholders in the decision making process? What is it that he/she is doing right now to champion our solution? When is the next time you will talk with the prospect? And so on.
Let me guess – Kyle gives you a blank stare and you wonder to yourself; if this is what he thinks is a great call, what do his bad calls sound like? I’ve been there. We can fix this.
A call review and scoring program can ensure that your reps are systematically approaching each call the same way and including the fundamentals of success. To be clear – I’m not a fan of scripts and I don’t write them. We build “conversation tracks” that intentionally include the sales call keys in a natural way that feel right to each rep. (Steve Richard note: At Vorsight we also do not use scripts which lend to robotic reading. Rather we use talking points which are sets of bullet points that go together. Sounds very similar to the “conversation tracks” idea.)
Below is an outline of our call review process at IO Education.
Because we use a phone platform that records every call, every day each member of the SDR team sends me a hyperlink to what they believe was their best call of the day. This is done for several reasons:
- We all know how to improve on bad calls. Improving upon the best calls is how to see exponential growth.
- Daily accountability promotes daily focus.
- It’s your responsibility to coach up or coach out. If the SDR is sending you the best call from their perspective you cannot be accused of picking only the worst calls to score.
The additional benefits of a call scoring system include:
- A rep that knows exactly what success looks like and how to achieve it is a thing of beauty.
- Data keeps your coaching consistent and scalable. Calls that “feel” good might not be when scored.
- Improvement over time is fully defined as you watch the scores increase with quality coaching and experience.
- The system is fully customizable giving you the ability to increase the score rewards on items your team/individuals need to focus on.
- You can make score correlations to desired results.
At IO Education, data has proven that a score of 150 or higher has – get this – a 100% success rate. As in every call that scores over 150 results in the creation of a new sales opportunity. The lower the score, the lower the call success rate. It’s that simple.
Each week we score 2 of the 5 calls sent to the manager and then we coach the SDR during the weekly one on ones on how to improve or congratulate them on perfection.
Define your keys to a successful call. Assign a point value to each key. Measure the result. Watch the pipeline explode.
