How Phone Call Tracking & Recording Can Increase Sales 

Identify Call Answering Issues

By recording phone calls you can identify common issues that may be negatively impacting your sales. Some of these include:

• Too many rings or forwarding issues – When your phone system takes too long to answer, it can hurt your sales efforts because a number of people hang up before anyone even answers the call. If someone looking for a product by searching in Google hangs up before the call is answered, they will likely go back to the Google search results and call someone else.
• Annoying voice system – Several voice systems either have too many or too few options, leading to customer frustration and lost leads.
• After hours call handling issues – Make sure that your phones specify when it is after office hours. Otherwise, a customer may be on hold without realizing that nobody is there to answer the call.
• Long hold times– Of course, people are more likely to hang up the longer they are on hold. Even if they do stay on the line, they will likely be upset about being put on hold for too long.
• Ineffective greetings– If someone needs to be put on hold, it is important to make sure that the initial greeting makes the caller feel comfortable and makes it clear that they will transfer the call to someone who can help them.

Call Recording as a Sales & Marketing Management & Training Tool

You can also use call recording as a sales and marketing management and training tool in a variety of ways. This will ultimately lead to more business and happier employees.

• Listen to sales calls to identify common objections– If callers often ask questions and your sales reps are struggling to convey an answer that shows value, you can identify these objections and come up with talking points for your team to use. If, for example, many people say “Just send me a quote”, you might teach your team to say something like “I’ll be happy to send a quote right over, but how about we get the (XYZ product) put on our schedule now to hold your spot?.”
• Listen to the call recordings to identify training needs– This is especially important for new representatives to help them learn about your products and services and for you to develop talking points, check lists, and other training resources for all your team. When you see issues for specific reps you can listen to their sales calls together, point out issues and guide them with a better sales approach.
• Outbound call recording– You can also record outbound sales calls so that you can listen to the follow-up calls from your representatives. You can even record outbound sales calls placed to people who did not call you first, such as those who submitted a an online inquiry form or inquiries from other lead sources. You can also record cold call campaigns in order to evaluate them later.
• Create a knowledge base of the best phone calls– You can build a “knowledge base” of good sales calls that led to closed deals. Listen for what statements were made that stimulated a positive response, and listen to these recordings with team members.
• Develop Ideas for Offers –Use customer input, questions, common objections and interests to develop possible offers. As you listen to the call recordings and make note of common objections and other barriers to closing deals, consider whether you should develop offers to help close business. For example ,if delivery charges are often objected to, maybe test offering $100 off delivery if you sign up now, and take the delivery on Friday.
• Team members can revisit the last call with a prospect –With the calls recorded, your reps can listen to the call again and make sure they are prepared for a follow-up call, that they remember key points they need to address, and that they took care of any agreed-upon actions.
• Use Call Recordings to Mediate Disputes –Was the customer promised something that the sales rep doesn’t remember? With the calls recorded you can listen to the call or read the transcript (transcriptions will be discussed later) and see what was said.
• Recognize and reinforce exemplary sales calls – While it’s important to identify training needs, you can also use call recordings as an opportunity to recognize positive achievements. Take the time to shine a spotlight on the good work your people are doing, so that their teammates can benefit from their example. This can inspire some healthy competition among the whole team, and bring out the best in everyone.

Let AI show you which marketing channels are driving the highest quality leads.

Some of these next features are available with Callrail’s call tacking system which is the one most of our customers use. If you find them valuable make sure the tracking system you choose includes a similar feature.

Call Scoring

Your team can easily mark the quality of the phone leads by selecting a simple good vs. bad check mark either during a call or after the call. However, with the calls recorded you can have CallRail’s automated call scoring system analyze the calls for you and automatically mark them good or bad using Artificial Intelligence (AI). Turn it on, then check the accuracy by checking a number of the calls marked good, and a number of the calls marked bad. With the calls scored reasonably accurately, you can see which marketing channels are giving you the highest percentage of good leads and invest more in those channels.

Transcriptions

You can have the phone calls automatically transcribed, which can be faster than listening to the full recording.

However, with the calls transcribed, the CallRail system can show you phrases that are spoken the most by callers within the calls that are marked as good leads. This is called Keyword Spotting, and helps in several ways:

• Pull the best leads from voicemails for immediate follow-up– Each morning, have the system show your team members the calls that include those keyword phrases from your voicemails so they can follow up on those leads first.
• “Rescue” sales– Keyword spotting can help close deals that would have been lost. Sales managers can listen to a number of the calls that include these keyword phrases and possible “rescue” sales that were not closed by your reps.
• Identify sales training issues– Of course is reps are not closing sales that a sales manager is able to “rescue” this highlights issues sales managers need to address with their representatives.

Phone call tracking and recording has proven to be an effective tool to increase sales by helping you learn about call answering issues hurting your sales efforts, helping your team close more of the leads you get, and learning which marketing channels are giving you the best quality leads. This ultimately leads to improving the number and quality of leads you get from your marketing efforts.