Its gross. But its damn effective.
Listening back to calls is an incredibly powerful training and coaching tool...that's why if you've been inducted into a company in the last decade you've probably listened to calls and almost certainly had your calls listened to and scrutinised.
But if we had to do that call monitoring ourselves, we'd hate it.
That's a shame, because it has some incredible benefits. Not only that (and I've talked about why this is so good for competitive salespeople before) but so few of your peers do it that you're immediately at an advantage.
Lets look at call listening best practice:
Break your call down into key sections
This helps you focus when you're call listening, and also gives you pre-defined development areas of attention.
The point of listening to call recordings is not to provide a grading or generic overall summary, that's a compliance task.
It’s about honing in on the specific minutes and seconds which made that call a success, a failure, or otherwise.
Perhaps it was a confusing positioning statement, or an objection made by the client which you didn't address with confidence.
Maybe you didn't focus on a client's main pains or challenges, and thus don’t ask the questions that’ll accentuate the pain.
The key is: you don't know if you don't listen to calls.
If you're squeamish - collaborate
Sales calls are tough. And the people in your company who know this better than anyone are the people living and breathing the same calls day in and day out -- your peers.
You’re all selling the same product to the same types of clients. With this in mind, your peers are the people best positioned to provide advice, feedback, and suggestions on your prospect interactions.
Invite your peers to listen back to your calls or specific key moments of your calls.
Have they come across the objection you struggled to overcome, and how did they handle it? If they could have asked one more discovery question, what would it have been?
Collaborating with peers is one of the most effective means of improving your call skills.
Which leads us on to:
Share Wins
Brokers are often guilty of keeping their tips and tricks to themselves; after all, you tend to be a competitive bunch.
But you must recognise of the value of sharing what you’ve done when things go well.
Sharing best practices is the bread and butter of coaching and helping all of your colleagues become effective.
Revisit Calls as prep
How many times have you jumped on a follow-up call with a prospect, and completely forgotten the key things that were discussed on the first call?
Perhaps you scribbled some notes down on a piece of paper you can no longer find, or the summary you added into Salesforce no longer looks as detailed as you thought it was.
It doesn’t matter, because clients don’t care.
Going into follow-up calls unprepared runs the risk of forcing clients to reiterate key pain points they already identified, or worse, makes it appear you weren’t listening on the initial call.
Revisiting your last call provides you with a true and honest reflection of everything uncovered on your first call, allowing you to probe further on pain points, previously agreed-upon actions, and additional areas of qualification.
Not only that, it also gives you something that notes don’t -- flow of the conversation, how the prospect responded to specific things you said, and tone. These softer aspects of the call can be critical when understanding where your product or service can really add most value to that particular person.
Finally, listening back to an old sales conversations is guaranteed to surface things you hadn’t even picked up on the first time.
In Summary: Make this a 'thing'
Without consistency and persistence, habits won’t stick.
As Brokers, we’re having new conversations with clients every single day.
While these conversations may cover similar topics; new objections, scenarios, and questions will always crop up. Consistent call review is crucial to ensuring you’re staying on message and not falling into old, sloppy habits.
Sitting in and shadowing live calls of your peers is time-inefficient.
To truly get value out of call recordings, time should be taken on a regular basis to listen to past calls, make observations, and assess what did or didn’t go well.
For further guidance on downloading and using call recording software, click HERE
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