The Maitland Mercury

Call recording for sales professionals: 4 best practices

Call recording for sales professionals: 4 best practices
Call recording for sales professionals: 4 best practices

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Call recording is typical among sales professionals to get better insights into sales process development. The call recordings can be used as reference material when training sales and customer service teams.

Also, recording calls means your team becomes less reliant on note-taking, making tracking more accurate, efficient, and productive. You can use what's being said on the call to measure your team's performance, too.

Unfortunately, some sales professionals still don't know how to use call recording despite the numerous benefits. This can be caused by a fundamentally broken approach to call recording, sales professionals avoiding laws and compliance regulations, or a lack of tools, such as call recording software. Using or benefiting from call recording can be challenging with such factors in play.

Sales professionals can implement some best practices when using call recording to ensure that they get the best out of it. Here's what they can do:

1 - There should be clear goals

A clear set of objectives should guide every activity in an organisation. Call recording isn't different. Your call recording should be aligned with your business goals. This will help your sales agents know what they seek to achieve when they record calls and what they'll use the recorded calls for. (1)

Some of the goals that should guide your call recording campaign include the following:

  • To align the customer satisfaction with the call recording goals. This will enable follow-ups and future calls to be more customer-centric.
  • To evaluate the quality of your customer service and your team's performance when conversing with prospects.
  • To evaluate the effectiveness of your training program. This will help you identify areas that need improvements or employees that may require further training. (1)

With such goals guiding your call monitoring, you stand a chance to get the best out of it, as you know what you want to achieve.

Call recording for sales professionals: 4 best practices
Call recording for sales professionals: 4 best practices

2 - Focus on call's key moments

Sales calls usually vary in length, depending on what stage of the purchase journey the call is made. For example, the first call with a new prospect can be less than a minute, while a call made during the sales demo can last for more than an hour. But when listening to the call, you don't focus on the length or the overall summary. Instead, you should focus on the key moments that made the call a success or failure. (2)

Listening to the key moments will help you identify where things took a turn for the worse. For example, your agent didn't address an objection made by a prospector, or they failed to capitalise on a prospect's main pain. If sales agents manage to pinpoint these key moments, they'll drill deeper into the sales process and lessen the ambiguity. This can also be used to deal with key moments in future calls. (2)

3 - Collaborate with peers

When you're reviewing your interactions with customers, you may fail to identify the key moments or understand a customer's action at that moment. Thankfully, there are people in your company who have already been through this moment and deal with daily sales calls. So, you can invite your peers to listen to the calls you made and help you identify such vital moments. Also, they'll provide advice and suggestions on your interactions and how you can improve. (2)

They may have come across an objection that you struggled to overcome, and they handled it by asking one more question. So, they'll give you tips on how to handle it by suggesting questions you can ask. Also, if you're struggling to summarise the features of a product to a customer and lead them to end the conversation, you can ask them how they did it. (2)

Collaboration won't only help you, but your peers, too. As they listen to your interactions, they can get tips on how to improve in sales areas that they're also struggling with.

4 - Implement policies according to the law

As stated earlier, some sales professionals fail to use call recording because of the law. Such laws dictate that the customer should have complete knowledge that the conversation is being recorded and consent to it. Other laws also state that you need to have a legal basis for recording calls. You should also note that the laws vary, and the laws of their location protect the customer. (3)

Therefore, when implementing call recording policies in your organisation, make sure you do it within the legal requirements to avoid fines. You can hire a lawyer to help set up such policies to reduce the risk of non-compliance. You can also ask your sales reps to notify customers that the call is being recorded. (3)

Conclusion

Call recording can be the difference-maker in your sales funnel. By reviewing these recorded calls, your team can identify the points of success or failure. These points can be used as a reference for future training and calls. But to get it right, you need to implement the strategy discussed in this article.

Reference:

2 - "Call Recording Laws: What Your Sales Team Need to Know in 2021", Source: https://www.execvision.io/blog/call-recording-laws/