15 Innovative Call Libraries to Build Out Today

Call libraries are a versatile way to preserve your organization’s best calls. There are endless themes and topics to create libraries around. Libraries can streamline training and onboarding, encourage ongoing learning and development, and provide a fun way to listen to calls. Here are 15 innovative call library themes to borrow for your team:

1. My Greatest Hits

Our data team analyzed 1000s of libraries across our customer accounts and discovered that the most popular library theme is “My Greatest Hits.” This one is super straightforward: reps create a fire mixtape of their best calls. This library is beneficial for hyping yourself up in the morning or after a rough call. It also provides reps a way to track their progress over time–earlier calls will sound very different from more recent conversations.

2. Onboarding & Training

There is no better way to introduce your products and services than listening to real calls. Onboarding libraries should be built out for each of your offerings and provide a clear picture of what that offering includes and how to pitch it (or explain it for customer success). Training libraries should focus on the skills necessary for fruitful conversations at your organization. Think objection handling for sales teams and churn indicators for CS. Onboarding and training libraries aren’t just for new hires either. Make sure your team knows where to access them so they can take a listen for self-driven development.

3. Product Enhancements & Features

If you’ve ever had a conversation where a customer said, “You know what would be helpful is if the product…”, you need a feature request library. When a platform idea surfaces, add it to the library with appropriate tags so your tech team can hear requests directly from the customer. Not every product idea is a good one. Saving them in a library allows you to spot patterns in requests before making a formal request to the product team.

4. Customer Compliments

Everyone loves getting compliments. In addition to sharing calls that compliment your team or product, save them to a library. It automatically provides an ego booster that can be helpful for the whole team. Customer compliments are also a great way to track what your teams are doing really well. The bonus benefits are you know what to do more of, and you can share this library with the executive team to highlight strengths.

5. Data Sets for Product

Buckle in. We’re getting technical. Machine Learning (ML) algorithms require data. The business conversations happening at your organization provide a plethora of highly valuable data. This data can help train models for many applications, from software to business intelligence. This library will require input from your data or technology team to decide what types of calls to add, but it is incredibly valuable.

6. Train Wrecks

Everyone at one time or another has a call that for whatever reason does not go well. For instance, maybe you flubbed your words or made an error regarding whom you were speaking with or gave out some wrong information. Perhaps the prospect was in a particularly bad mood and just snapped at you. Nobody’s perfect. Trainwreck libraries can help overcome flubs, show new hires that it’s okay if things go awry, or serve as a source of a good laugh.

7. Laugh Tracks

Speaking of laughs, a laugh track library is fun and lighthearted. Ask reps to submit calls for several reasons: a silly mistake, a funny comment from a prospect, ludicrous analogies for your product, or even harmless contests. If you’ve ever watched Super Troopers, the iconic meow scene comes to mind. Laugh track libraries are a good morale booster that helps the team bond and reminds everyone that work doesn’t have to be 100% serious all of the time.

8. Marketing Messaging

The marketing department has messaging they expect your teams to use when speaking with prospects or customers. One of their biggest challenges is understanding how messaging is resonating with buyers because they rely on lagging indicators such as leads and sales. Creating a call library around specific messaging allows them to hear firsthand how people react. Marketing can also leverage this for creating a record of past campaigns and contracts to help inform future rollouts.

9. Campaign Effectiveness

Campaign libraries are incredibly valuable for your marketing team. They can review call volume, effectiveness, and how customers perceive a campaign. Marketing campaign libraries can also segment how personas react or identify if specific words or phrases impact success rates.

10. Specific Call Phases

Have a call where you rocked handling an objection? Nominate it for the objection handling library. By creating libraries around call phases, your team can educate themselves on different ways to approach things like introductions, pitching, going for time, and more. These libraries also serve as a way to keep everyone aligned on the correct call structure–each library represents the ingredients needed for a great call.

11. Calls of Fame

Every organization should create a Hall of Fame for their best calls. Whether you source them through a call of the month competition or preserve the best-of-the-best from reps who get promoted or move on to other orgs, these should be the cream of the crop. Conversation submitted to this library should be explicitly annotated to explain why it earned a spot. That way, reps who want to go from average to high performing can listen and understand the minute differences between an okay call and one that knocked it out of the park.

12. Industry and Vertical

One of the best libraries you can build for your team is for industries and verticals. These libraries help reps understand what challenges and critical business issues they’ll encounter, the language used by prospects, and which personas they’ll be calling. Team members can quickly learn what productive conversations sound like without having to spend hours learning about the industry by googling things.

13. Prospect Account or Customer

While there are other ways to save all of the calls related to specific prospects or customers (for instance, saved search), libraries are incredibly helpful for knowledge sharing. Customer libraries are incredibly powerful for creating a seamless customer experience. Sales can add their calls before handing the account over to customer success. As the account travels through the customer journey, customer success can preserve their calls to prepare for renewal and upsell conversations. Should the customer’s CSM change, their new account manager can quickly get up to speed by listening to calls in that customer’s library.

14. Personas

Having trouble cracking the code of executive assistants to the C-Suite? A persona library can help. For many organizations, there are many personas the sales team will encounter, and they each have different preferences and needs. Building a persona library will help your team master talking to CEOs, marketers, and even the somewhat tricky IT leaders. Persona libraries also give your marketing team a quick way to find calls relevant to a persona and truly hear what they’re saying. When marketing can enhance targeting and messaging because of this intel, everyone wins.

15. Victorious Voicemails

If you hate leaving voicemails because no one calls you back, this library is for you. While many technologies allow you to auto-drop a voicemail, if it’s not effective, it’s not worth your time. This library should feature your team’s best voicemails that have consistent callback rates. That way, when a rep runs into the abyss of no callbacks, they can review what’s working for others and give it a try.

Call libraries are incredibly valuable across the entire organization. From product to sales, everyone can find insights, data, and best practices relevant to their role.