Anyone who has spent any short period of time cold calling knows the euphoria of not only getting someone on the phone but also the endorphin dump your brain experiences when the person you are talking to says “I’m interested”. It is one of those scenarios where all logical thought, everything you learned in onboarding and all common sense goes out the window as your natural instinct is to seize the opportunity to win. Reviewing calls like this in traditional, reactive conversational software, is in a lot of ways like playing Russian roulette. You never know what is going to happen next… could be really good, or the call (and subsequent opportunity) could quickly die.
The battles we face in sales coaching are not likely to have universe-wide good vs evil ramifications or severe injury, or death. However, it doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from the mistakes made in the Star Wars Universe by Jedi Masters. (if this is too geeky, you can stop reading…). Below are the top 3 reasons that something to be desired, your sales coaching leaves.
But we already are using frameworks…
Scripts, playbooks, Wikis, battle cards, cheat sheets… Your sales enablement organization is likely already deploying their method and subsequent tool to help your sales reps know how to organize call structures based upon variables like lead source, opportunity stage, buyer persona, current technographics, etc. Sales frameworks are, in large part, essentially the same thing; unfortunately what we have found is that regardless of the naming convention you use internally to describe the roadmap your reps should be using, the reality is that they often are not.
But we already are using frameworks…
Scripts, playbooks, Wikis, battle cards, cheat sheets… Your sales enablement organization is likely already deploying their method and subsequent tool to help your sales reps know how to organize call structures based upon variables like lead source, opportunity stage, buyer persona, current technographics, etc. Sales frameworks are, in large part, essentially the same thing; unfortunately what we have found is that regardless of the naming convention you use internally to describe the roadmap your reps should be using, the reality is that they often are not.
Hello, is this Mr. (NAME)? This is Bob and we have a very special offer for – *click (call disconnected). Does that sound about right? That’s because cold calling scripts don’t work – and that didn’t work because Bob was really set up for failure in the first place. Anecdotal, this has been quite obvious for some time… but using conversational intelligence software has made the fact that cold calling scripts don’t work. There are several problems with scripts and how they are applied to sales to list here, but in this blog, we are going to concentrate on the top several reasons that cold calling scripts don’t work and what you can do to achieve the same results without having every employee and prospect loath the thought of communication to do with you organization.
A standard salesperson is going to change what they say a little bit on every call. But if you’re anything like me you probably say something pretty close on most standard calls. Your top performers are likely more consistent than your low performers. Sometimes top performers change things up a little bit and their performance can suffer as a result. Having the ability to track consistency across sales calls, and also enable salespeople to say the best structure of a call every time, is a great reason to invest in sales call intelligence software.
While your Sales Team struggles to meet quota, there are Conversation Intelligence tools that literally could not only save their jobs, but exceed quotas. Annual revenue goals met. Customer attrition issues solved. Conversation Intelligence needs to be “live”, not post-call analytics, but “Real-Time Conversation Intelligence”.
Some of the top sales call intelligence software companies today are adding components of AI and advanced analytics to speed the process of learning. But, some of the most advanced companies are actually prompting reps with structure in real-time. Spoil alert, one of those companies is Abstrakt. Here are three best practices when it comes to using call intelligence software to get reps on the correct structure quickly.
They’ve done studies you know, 60% of the time, it works every time! Actually, when sales leaders review calls and demos in their real-time call coaching platform, they find that the takeaway actually works closer to 100% of the time. When tools like Abstrakt are deployed, and recognize objections or pick up decent, recommended responses can help reps overcome sales objections by highlighting options for reps to use like the takeaway. Below, we are going to dive into some reasons why 100% of the time, the takeaway works every time.
Just like real life, it probably won’t always go to plan, so we have contingency plans pop up when something goes sideways. For example, we were not planning on a competitor coming up, but when it happens, there are immediate sales call frameworks with helpful bullets on how to handle the call. Because of this, our team is able to complete a Sales Conversation intelligence Platform checklist of before CI, during CI, and post CI (analytics).