If you’re on a B2B sales team in 2023, you already know that it’s hard out there.
Every conversation feels (and sometimes is) make-or-break. In this environment, many sales managers have been turning to recording sales calls to gain a competitive edge.
But technology advances have made sales call recording practically table stakes at this point. Which begs the question: When everyone’s doing it, what are YOU doing differently?
Turns out, it’s not just about capturing conversations. It's about using the data from sales call recordings to win more, instead of being overwhelmed by it. In this post, we will talk about why and how to record sales calls — and what you must do next to really move the needle.
Why You Should Record Sales Calls
Someone much smarter than me wrote an excellent book titled Start With Why, and that’s exactly what we’ll do here.
Let’s take a step back and explore why firms are shelling out for sales call recording tools and software.
The biggest reasons are:
Consistency of Message
Maintaining consistency in sales calls is crucial to build a repeatable sales motion.
After all, if you’re changing things up constantly, it’s impossible to know what’s working and what’s not. Every interaction with a potential customer is an opportunity to reinforce your brand, product features, and unique selling proposition. But in a fast-paced sales environment, it's difficult to make sure all sales reps are singing the same song.
This is typically the first reason teams start recording sales calls. By capturing and reviewing those calls, you can identify patterns in messaging across your team.
Are there key points everyone hits? Are there common stumbling blocks?
Knowing these patterns helps boost sales outcomes and ensures clear communication with customers.
Training Sales Reps
Sales is a skill that evolves with experience. And the best way to improve is by getting reps their, well, reps (as in repetitions 💪). But to actually progress, sellers need proper training.
By reviewing recorded calls, you can pinpoint specific moments in prospect interactions where sellers hit the mark and where they fell short. This helps with coaching, improving sales pitches, handling objections, and winning more deals.
Generating Learnings for Your Business
In the age of data, making decisions based on intuition alone won't cut it. Sales call recording powers your GTM motion with a trove of data that you can analyze and mine for actionable insights. From understanding customer pain points to identifying objections to flagging new competitors, recording your sales calls instantly provides an ocean of insights.
To fully grasp all the knowledge that can be gained from recording your calls, make sure to check out Gong's Mind-Blowing Sales Stats. Among other things, they found that cursing — yes, using naughty words — can improve win rates.
Moreover, the iterative nature of selling means that your business can adapt and refine its strategies in real-time. As trends and patterns emerge, you have hard data — not mere intuition — to drive decisions and pivots.
How to Record Sales Calls (the Right Way)
Keep reading if you are new to sales call recording or simply want to make sure you are configured properly.
We’ll start with some great news: There are plenty of powerful sales call recording solutions out there, so getting started should be a breeze.
First, you want to research and choose your solution. Companies like Gong.io are proven leaders in this arena, and offer everything you need to get started quickly. It’s really a matter of choosing the right solution for your business based on factors like:
- Price & Licensing Model
- Support Offerings
- Integrations
- Additional features
- Customer Experience
In addition to Gong, Rattle integrates with Chorus.A.I. and Zoom.
You’ll want to convene a committee of internal stakeholders to select the right tool for your organization. Typical business units involved in the decision making process are:
- RevOps or Sales Ops
- Sales Enablement
- Sales Managers and CRO
- IT & Information Security
- Product Marketing
- Finance & Legal
Each department will likely have their own wishlist for the perfect tool. That means it’s important to document a project plan that incorporates cross-functional feedback into your selection process.
Once you’ve selected your tool and set it up, you’re off to the races. Congrats! In no time, you’ll be swimming in sweet, sweet sales call goodness.
Incorporate Sales Call Recording Into Your Workflows
But wait… most organizations stop there.
Leaders and reps will diligently record every call, but actually review them somewhere between seldom and never. Don’t be like most organizations.
That’s why you’re here, after all…
To ensure visibility and use, the outputs of recording sales calls should be seamlessly integrated into the natural workflow of your team. The last thing you want to add is extra steps or process changes. So, if you’re asking your team to toggle between different programs or browser windows, you’re probably not going to get very far.
Look to integrate your call recording intelligence into the place(s) your team lives and breathes — or in a digital world, works. That might be a CRM like Salesforce, a sales prospecting platform like Outreach, or team collaboration tool like Slack.
The destination for surfacing this information to frontline sellers will vary based on your technology and processes. However, it is important to ensure that your employees can access it easily without adding another username and password.
Use an A.I. Assistant to Parse Sales Call Transcriptions
We’ll just come out and say it: There’s simply no way sales reps or revenue leaders have the time — or the mental fortitude — to listen to their team’s calls at scale. We tossed around a lot of grand descriptors in this article (mountain, ocean, etc.), and, trust us, these aren’t hyperbole.
Figure the average call runs 30 minutes. If you’ve got even a modest team of 10 reps doing 20 calls weekly, that’s 6,000 minutes of calls a week. After a month, you’ll have 24,000 minutes of calls to review.
Ain’t nobody got time for that.
Sure, some stakeholders like marketing, executive leadership, etc., can find all the value they need from sporadically listening to highlights.
But you’re a superfan, so the greatest hits won’t cut it.
No, you want to digest the deep cuts: the tough conversations, the nitty gritty details, the multi-threaded minutiae — of every. single. deal.
And the only way to do that at scale is by enlisting A.I. call transcription to summarize your calls and highlight key details like:
- Attendees
- Discussion Topics
- Customer Pain Points
- Objections or Roadblocks
- Pricing or Negotiations
- Proposed Solutions or Next Steps
A.I. snapshots help CROs and sales managers stay updated on deals without spending too much time on call reviews. (I’ve seen our CRO’s calendar, and he definitely ain’t got time for that.)
Trust us, A.I. summaries are crucial to getting value from this purchase. There are lots of tools on the market that provide these call transcriptions and summaries (including Rattle).
Whichever you choose, consider the investment essential to your success. Once again, send these summaries to the digital hubs where your team works. Do not push your team to a separate browser or tool. This will ensure that your team sees and uses the data.
Automate. Automate. Automate.
The last step to recording sales calls the right way is to layer on automations to surface and capture key data at critical moments in the sales funnel. This final piece connects important information with frontline sellers who will use it.
Remember, those calls are quickly going to snowball into a mountain of unstructured data. Even with A.I. snapshots logging next steps and other details, the insights must reach your teammates in a timely manner in an actionable format.
Automated signals to those digital hubs (Slack, CRM, MAP, etc.) where your team lives are the ultimate cheat code to turning sales call recording into your force multiplier. For example, you could trigger signals for the following:
- When a competitor is mentioned in a call, send a battle card to the rep who is handling the deal. This will allow them to make any necessary adjustments to their follow-up.
- Suggest CRM updates for the account or opportunity object based on learnings surfaced during the call.
- Send persona-specific insights to various team members on a deal (e.g., technical specs discussed for your SE team, or deal terms for your CRO’s approval).
Great, Now What? Put Sales Call Recording to Work
Recording sales calls is just the first step; the real value lies in what you do with the data. Many companies only record information and miss out on the transformative potential of their investment.
Here's how you can leverage your new trove of gold to take your sales execution to the next level:
Achieve Next-Level CRM Hygiene
One of the quickest wins when it comes to implementing — or optimizing — sales call recording is piping all that transcript data you get into your CRM.
When an A.I. is mining calls for insights and picking out key details, your reps will find it beyond easy to actually update their opportunities and accounts with items like:
- Contacts
- Close date
- Next Steps
- Products
- Pricing
Once you’re set with the basic implementation of sales call recording software, look to capitalize on this low-hanging fruit. Trust us, your data will be so much cleaner and trustworthy. Rattle can help here, too.
Coach with Targeted Guidance
In sales, the scoreboard provides a pretty clear window into team performance. Lagging team members are easy to spot. Sales call recording helps you give specific guidance using real examples. Instead of relying on personal anecdotes, you can rewind the tapes and provide tailored advice to employees.
Whether it's addressing communication gaps, refining objection-handling techniques, or improving closing strategies, targeted coaching driven by recorded examples can quickly boost rep performance. We recommended running your coaching playbooks through collaboration apps like Slack, since these allow for two-way, back-and-forth interactions between reps and their managers.
Replicate Success
Just as important as identifying areas for improvement is recognizing and replicating what works. When you record sales calls, you reveal patterns of success – the phrases that resonate with customers, the messages that land with a thud, the objection-handling techniques that prove effective, and the closing strategies that win.
By analyzing successful interactions, you can distill key elements that contribute to positive outcomes. This information can then be shared across the team, allowing everyone to incorporate proven strategies into their own approaches.
Share Insights for Collective Growth
Valuable insights gleaned from recorded sales calls shouldn't be confined to the sales team alone.
Marketing teams can gain a deeper understanding of customer pain points, product teams can fine-tune offerings based on customer feedback, and customer support teams can anticipate and address common concerns.
Ultimately, sales call recording aligns the entire organization to on-the-ground realities. That’s far too important not to circulate.
Go Forth and Conquer
Let’s recap everything covered in this post. The TLDR version is:
- Revenue teams record sales calls to generate data-backed insights on their customers and sales processes
- Sales call recording is easy to set up with the right solution, but most organizations fail to truly capitalize on the data they collect
- To harness the power of recording sales calls, you must make sure the data is visible and actionable by putting it in the hubs where sellers work, tapping A.I. to generate insights at scale, and automate signals based on call data to improve win rates.
While all that might seem like a tall order, in any revenue org, you must remember a few things: Data is nothing without insight. Insights not actioned are useless. And action only matters when it's consistent. Driving behavioral change across your selling team is the holy grail. Apply these principles to sales call recording, and you've got surefire roadmap to outgunning your competitors in a tough market.
