And How to Cultivate a Productive Practice for Your Team
It comes as no surprise that contact center sales organizations and quality assurance teams struggle to dedicate sufficient time to listening to sales call recordings for coaching purposes.
Outdated technology has not made this task easy.
Regrettably, evaluating sales call recordings often proves to be time-consuming and inefficient. And in the world of contact center sales teams, time is synonymous with money.
This unfortunate reality means that a wealth of insights and coaching opportunities are being overlooked. On average, only 2% of contact center interactions undergo evaluation. Just imagine the valuable knowledge that remains untapped within the other 98%.
The bottom line is, by neglecting to listen to sales calls, you are doing your team a disservice.
Here are three compelling reasons why you should prioritize the review of your sales call recordings—and actionable steps you can take to achieve it.
Providing Your Sales Team with the Support They Deserve
Whether you work in a contact center or engage in B2B software sales like myself, it’s no secret that sales is a challenging profession. It entails high risks and high rewards, and sales representatives are primarily evaluated based on their final performance.
- How many conversations did they handle?
- How many conversations led to conversions?
- Are they meeting their quotas?
- Are bookings (and their size) increasing?
Succeeding in sales demands extensive knowledge about customers, your product, and effective approaches for handling common sales scenarios.
As leaders, we have a responsibility to do better and take accountability for our team’s success, ensuring it happens faster and more consistently.
If sales managers and leaders are unwilling to invest time in listening to phone calls, we are not fulfilling our duties.
Starting from a sales rep’s initial onboarding session, their professional journey rests in our hands, and they deserve better than that.
Enhancing Sales Rep Performance in a Predictable Manner
While managers and trainers can impart new sales tactics and methodologies in a training environment, there is nothing quite as impactful as showcasing real-world examples.
For sales representatives, listening to actual call recordings that feature effective rebuttals, upsells, messaging, and key steps in the sales process can be invaluable.
Insights from quality assurance (QA) evaluations play a pivotal role in coaching, and organizations with a formal coaching program are four times more likely to have top performers. This directly translates to increased revenue, higher customer satisfaction, and improved operational efficiency.
By actively listening to sales conversations, I can identify areas where a representative excels and provide targeted support and enablement. For contact centers with a dedicated QA team and established processes, fostering a strong partnership with QA leaders enables better visibility and generates valuable insights that can be shared with sales teams.
Prioritizing Compliance in Every Sales Call
Listening to sales call recordings serves a purpose beyond enhancing deal closure rates.
For businesses operating in highly regulated industries, it is essential to listen to sales calls to ensure compliance and mitigate risks by verifying that sales representatives adhere to key protocols.
We are all familiar with the potential consequences of noncompliance for a business, but there are equally severe repercussions for the sales representative involved.
Can you imagine the impact on a sales rep who is accountable for a compliance breach that could have been easily identified and addressed through call monitoring?
This concern keeps contact center leaders awake at night, and understandably so. No one wants to expose their organization to unnecessary risks or lose a valuable employee due to preventable circumstances.
Essential Factors for Evaluating a Higher Volume of Sales Interactions
Now that I’ve presented my case for why sales leaders and QA teams should review more interactions, I want to provide you with practical ideas that you can implement with your sales team immediately.
- Lead by example
If you want your sales team, sales coaches, and QA team to listen to more calls, begin by doing it yourself. Set aside dedicated time on your schedule to evaluate interactions. Leading by example will inspire others to follow suit.
- Foster a culture of sharing
Document your insights from calls and share them with individual sales reps and the team as appropriate. This cultivates a culture of sharing and encourages more people to engage in the practice. Specify which parts of a call are worth reviewing and provide use case examples. If a sales rep excelled in the opening or handled a pricing question or objection exceptionally well, share those details with the team so they can easily reference the specific moments.
- Structured feedback delivery
After listening to a call, provide the sales rep with a document containing a bulleted list of feedback, including both positive and negative aspects. Salespeople truly appreciate this gesture as it demonstrates that we care about their development. If you genuinely care about your team, show them that you are willing to invest in their growth. To ensure structured coaching, leverage technology that seamlessly connects QA evaluations to coaching and tracks sales reps’ performance.
- Utilize call transcripts
Implement sales call recording software that automatically transcribes conversations and allows for easy searchability. This will enhance efficiency in identifying areas for improvement. Whether it’s inbound or outbound calls, searchable transcripts are a valuable functionality that enables you to leverage call recording insights more effectively.
- Choose the right technology
Speaking of technology, select a conversation intelligence platform that provides comprehensive visibility into every customer interaction across various channels. The latest advancements in QA automation enable contact center leaders to evaluate and analyze 100% of sales rep interactions, empowering managers and coaches to provide targeted support based on real-life scenarios.
- Monitor progress
When investing time in a task, it’s natural to expect results. Assess how the insights you’ve shared from evaluating interactions are impacting your team’s performance. Determine which areas require additional coaching and follow-up. New reporting and analytics tools for contact centers can provide you with this information, enabling you to take action based on your insights.