Sales are one aspect of any business that directly impacts the bottom line. In fact, it goes to the very root of the existence of the business itself. While in-person and home-to-home sales visits work well when dealing with the end customer, it is sales calls that rule the roost when it comes to B2B (Business to Business) sales.
There is a lot to give and take in any sales transaction. If you own or work in a business that is selling its products or services to other businesses, then it becomes more important for you to monitor your attempts to convert leads into sales and see why your conversion rates are not up to the standard.
In this context, call recording can play a huge role by helping you make correct decisions at a managerial level. There are two types of inputs to such decision-making: objective data and subjective data. Objective data includes all facts and figures, while subjective data includes qualitative aspects such as the behavior of your sales representative in a sales call. Taking the help of customer success management software is key to growth.
In this post, we shall discuss some of the ways in which call recording can help your business achieve new heights in terms of sales. Let’s get started.
- PinPoint The Problems: The first and the foremost benefit of call recording in a B2B context is that since both the parties are business, there is no need for too much rhetoric. In fact, with businesses callers need to get straight to the point, or else they may lose them.
When you can get access to how your sales representatives talk to customers, what words and phrases they use, and which of those evoke negative reactions from the other side, you can make the required changes by informing your communications team. This way, your sales team also gets accurate and data-based feedback, which will help them correct their tone as well, if necessary.
- Reduced Disputes: Many times, calls can lead to miscommunication between two people which can turn into a dispute very soon. In order to avoid such a happening, regularly observing the calls can help identify if the disputes are occurring on any particular product or service issue or is it the person who is responsible for the same.
Whatever may be the reason behind the dispute, it is important to not just reduce it, but also, prevent them from snowballing into a legal conundrum. At the last stage, if it still does, at least the call recording can be used to ascertain who was at fault so as to take proper legal steps.
- Assess Lead Quality: As a manager, when you listen to sales calls, besides assessing your team’s performance, you could also gauge the quality of the leads that your sales representative is following up with.
For instance, your sales team may have multiple lead generation sources. There is a chance that when monitoring the sales calls you to find out that all the leads offered by one particular source are fake and always lead to dead ends. This would not have been possible without call recordings because sales management software may not have such detailed feedback mechanisms in place.
- Product/Service Improvement: This one is a no-brainer. At the end of the day, it is your product or service that needs to make the sale. If that is not improved with every passing day, there is no hope of achieving better numbers.
With call recording, you will get crucial information. For example, what features your customers are looking for, what features among them are non-negotiable, which of those are optional for them and which are either additional or premium features that can make your product a must-have for them. This is a gold mine of qualitative information which can make a world of a difference to your product development strategy.
- Customized Follow-Ups: Most sales management software have an option of marking a lead as one that needs a follow-up call. But what is lacking here is enough data or recording as a feeder for the next person who is going to make the follow-up call. This irritates the person on the other end and may result in a no-sale.
Having call recordings will ensure that the reason why the follow-up was needed can be ascertained. As a consequence, this can aid the next caller to show the person receiving the call that the company took them seriously and remembered the exact issue which was troubling them.
- Identifying Happy Customers: A lot of the time, when customers are happy with the product or service provided, or even the information provided by the sales representative, they express their appreciation. This can be really helpful to identify the happy customers, and later on to reach out to them for permission to publish their feedback as a testimonial on your website.
The benefits of call recording are many. A business, however, also needs to comply with the laws surrounding call recording in its jurisdiction.