The sales experience has changed dramatically. There are more decision makers than ever, most of whom are incredibly risk-averse. Your salespeople need to be on top of their game to get a “yes”.
As a sales leader, it’s your job to make sure your team thrives in 2022; that they’re selling in a way that delivers an amazing experience for prospects.
But the main challenge with running and coaching a sales team today is that many of them are working remotely or flexibly. You can provide training, but how do you actually know what’s happening on calls?
How remote working is affecting your sales team
Remote working creates two obstacles for sales reps and managers.
For reps, remote or flexible working means they can’t overhear colleagues on the phone or chat across the desk. They don’t get to listen to someone make a model pitch (or someone else crash and burn) so trying out new things becomes incredibly nerve-wracking. It’s impossible to know what they’re doing right or wrong.
For managers, on the other hand, the problem is a lack of visibility. They don’t know how many calls are being made by their team or what the quality is like. Most managers are left with anecdotal feedback: reps telling them that they’ve made the calls but the deals aren’t going anywhere. It’s hard to help because it’s hard to know what happened.
Learning about what happens on calls across your team is more important than ever to help reps grow, overcome blocked deals and drive accountability. It’s crucial to make sure people are selling in the way that today’s prospects want them to – and that’s where sales coaching tech comes in.
How Call AI works
1. How to coach your team
Call AI was invented to help you become an amazing sales coach, but not spend all your time doing it. It gives you that all-important visibility by recording sales calls, so you know exactly where you can make a difference to your team.
The Call AI dashboard pulls insights out of calls and allows you to see how much someone’s talked or the words they’ve used the most. At a glimpse, you can see whether it’s been a good or bad call and the specific areas your rep could improve.
This technology is already massive in the US and Call AI is one of the fastest growing sales coaching tools in the UK. It has a phenomenal impact on remote teams and is proof you don’t need to rinse your entire budget to get results.
2. How to elevate your sales training
The way to get the most out of Call AI is to link it to your sales training. You want to work with your training provider so you can see which reps are effectively following the training and where others need support.
For example, we teamed up with Mindtickle to develop themes that reflect the modules in our sales coaching. Here’s how it works.
Your Call AI dashboard will show you everyone’s calls – maybe you’ve got a team of 40 people and they’ve done 400 Zoom calls this week.
Calls are ranked red, amber or green, depending on how effectively they match the training, meaning you can jump immediately to best practice examples or conversations that need improvement.
Once you click into a call, you’ll see useful statistics on how those calls compare. These might include:
- The length of the call
- How many questions were asked
- The keywords that are mentioned
- The balance between talking and listening
This is incredibly useful for managers because it provides visibility over distinct areas your sales reps are getting right and wrong.
If a deal is stagnating and you don’t know why, you can jump into Call AI and see how that rep’s calls are colour coded. Within each call, you might see that they’re talking over 90% of the time when actually they should be listening more.
Most managers are currently relying on a couple of lines in Salesforce that get filtered and filtered through each level of the company. Here, they can have visibility and confidence without having to listen to a single call.
Call AI also gives salespeople the ability to be more present, which is definitely required. Normally, people end up transcribing the entire call because they don’t know what’s important. The fact they can go back and listen to it helps them stay in the conversation, and also gives them the ability to self-reflect and self-coach.
– Anthony Parker, General Manager, EMEA at Mindtickle
3. How to boost new starters or underperformers
We talked earlier about the inability to overhear other calls or chat across desks that comes with remote working. By having recordings of others on the team, people can hear what their peers are doing and share best practices.
This is super useful if you’re onboarding a new starter or someone’s lacking the confidence to try a new approach. With Call AI, they can replay the recording as much as they like, until they’re comfortable trying something similar in their own sales patter.
Finally, the tool allows your best reps to get even better. In addition to listening to other calls, you can encourage your team to reflect on their own strengths and improve their proposals.
4. Ramp up the speed of new hires
Once you’ve built up a few recordings (which often only takes a few weeks), the next step is to create a library of brilliant sales calls.
Let’s say there was an awesome case of questioning or objection handling on your team. You can add that call to a library with a note that includes the relevant time stamp.
That means that when new starters come in or you want to do training, you can look up the relevant library and show your team how they should be selling.
This really helps to ramp up speed for new hires. It means they no longer have to sit there with the theory, alone in their home office, and wonder how it works in practice. They’ve got a clear example to build on before any doubts or nerves set in.
Get complete visibility into sales conversations
With many teams working remotely or flexibly, it’s tough to know where your sales reps are excelling – and where they need help. Call AI gives you greater visibility over your team’s conversations so you can improve accountability, drive performance and deliver a first-rate sales experience.
If you’ve gone through Flume training, you can create the themes on Call AI to make sure people are actually using it. You get the ability to understand and see the impact that training is having in real life, then correlate it against outcomes. If people are using the phrasing and terminology, are they improving in terms of closed deals? Are the people who aren’t using it struggling?
Most sales training companies don’t offer this proposition, because they’re not actually interested in outcomes. Flume isn’t interested in selling training; Flume is interested in selling the outcomes.
– Anthony Parker, General Manager, EMEA at Mindtickle
Chat to Flume today to learn more about how Call AI could work for your team or send us an enquiry.