Better Visibility Equals Better Results

Due to recent sales team decentralization, it has become difficult for managers to track the individual activities of team members. The use of CRM has increased as the desire to bridge this gap in communication and management has grown; however, CRM is only as important as the data exists in it and recent studies show that many companies are heavily underachieving, as only 40% of sales enablement efforts are measured. This is mainly a result of sales reps manually inputting activity data, which costs organizations time and money. Because of the dispersion of sales reps and somewhat subjective methods of management, an automated service that can track and capture call activity from many separate devices is essential.

Regardless of the result of a certain sales call, there is a plethora of data that can be recorded, analyzed, and acted on for improvement. This real-time data can be used to create and achieve more realistic forecasted goals, and provide full team visibility of sales behavior guidelines which can then be used to coach and train sales forces much more easily. First, a manager should be able to rely on a service that can record the number of calls a rep makes, the duration of the calls, and the outcome of each call. Contrary to popular belief, the duration of a call is not the only factor indicating success of a sales call. Other less obvious indicators include: how well the rep represented the product/brand and its subsequent value to the lead; the ability of the rep to answer and provide any necessary information to the lead; how the lead responded to the rep.

The bottom line is that many sales managers don’t understand the amount of valuable information that is available to them in just one sales call from one rep to one lead. With the ability to track and capture call activity from your top sales rep to your bottom sales rep, you can create a standard set of behaviors that illustrate successful (and unsuccessful) outcomes. You can create more realistic forecasted goals for each member of your sales force as well as the goals of your entire team.

American companies spend $16 billion annually on sales training alone, yet 70% of that disappears within the first 30 days if a newly hired rep isn’t prepared with the correct tools and resources to produce results in the field. Utilizing a tool that can capture and provide data from call quantity and frequency to in-call speech analytics is the only way to adequately boost your sales effectiveness.