With so much technology at your fingertips, it’s easier than ever to hone your skills and take sales to the next level. One aspect you can always improve upon is handling sales calls. At Fireflies, we analyzed hundreds of thousands of sales calls for our customers and figured out some of the best practices that worked well for them over the past year.
By integrating Fireflies with Freshsales CRM, you can record, transcribe, and log all your sales calls inside the CRM. It also helps managers monitor, train, and share best practices with their sales reps faster.
Here are five post-call resolutions for 2019 backed by data from our own conversation tracking software.
1. Create post call tasks and notes
Chances are you are having dozens of back-to-back meetings. This means that you are more likely to miss information between calls. Tasks and next steps will fall through the cracks. You may even misinterpret what was said on one call with what happened on another call. Sales reps aren’t to blame for this. In an effort to close deals and keep up with sales activities, reps tend to neglect data hygiene inside their CRM.
If you don’t remember what was said on a call by the end of the day, how do you expect to remember it two weeks from now when you need to follow up with that prospect? Post-call notes and tasks are a must to fix this problem. Don’t wait until the end of the day. Do it right after each call. Try to wrap a meeting up two minutes ahead of schedule or have a 10-minute gap between meetings. If you’re really strapped for time, use the Fireflies and Freshsales integration to automatically summarize your calls and pull out action items. Fireflies will then log the call notes, transcripts, and tasks under the appropriate contact automatically after each call. Now, you can spend less time scrambling to take notes and more time focusing on your conversation.
2. Share insights from sales calls with teammates
Sales is a team sport. You will need to hand deals over to another sales rep or a customer success manager at some point in time. Don’t leave them in the dark when you do this. Discussing with them what happened on the sales calls will help set them up for success. Your sales quota may directly be linked to their success at closing the account.
Sales calls also have a goldmine of insights for product teams. For example, your prospect may give you feedback on features they thought were complicated. As a sales rep, you would hear dozens of feature requests every week. You are the eyes and ears on the front lines for product and engineering teams, and you can help them build the right product so you can have an easier time selling it.
Within the Fireflies dashboard, there is an opportunity to flag important feedback and share it via Slack. We also push back these highlights into Freshsales so that the customer success manager is aware of important points that they need to follow up on from the rep’s discussion.
3. Review your sales call analytics
With the power of AI, we can distill conversations and quantify what is being said on calls. With Fireflies, you can flag alerts of key topics like pricing, discounts, objections, and next steps. Fireflies also measures talk time and other metrics like how many questions you asked and how much time you let the prospect speak.
Reviewing these metrics will make you more aware of the gaps in your conversation. Maybe you are taking too much on the call and not asking enough probing questions. You might not have touched on pricing at all on your calls and that is leading to objections. The Fireflies integration with Freshsales will give you insight like these. The best way to improve is to look back at the game tape and identify your mistakes.
4. Be coachable so that managers can 10x your sales skills
The task of the modern sales manager is a demanding hybrid of several roles, including that of a coach. So while they might not always find time to take part in live calls, they’re still there to help you get better at selling. With all your calls recorded and transcribed in one place, this becomes easier than ever.
With access to call audio and text, managers can offer their teams guidance where they need it most. Whether it’s on how to handle objections, how to open a call, or suggest the right follow up activities at the end of each meeting, reps get relevant feedback and managers can easily dissect calls to provide that feedback.
Sales reps who are looking to grow into A-grade players know that practical learning is the quickest path there. When your manager can listen to recordings of your calls and pinpoint areas of improvement, you’ll be able to turn mistakes into strengths. And once you take those learnings on board, your career trajectory will improve.
5. Remember the little things that build big relationships
When you’re focused on selling your product or service, it can be easy to lose track of the need to build relationships with your leads. As every sales rep knows (50% rank it as their preferred sales activity), the best relationships focus on the little things. And sometimes, those details might be the difference between closed-won and closed-lost.
The ability to listen to sales calls helps you pull out the most relevant information, personalize messages and gestures, and create more engaging touchpoints. So when you follow up, speaking to each lead on a human level helps them feel appreciated and valued.
Marketing automation has made life simpler for sales professionals, enabling them to reach more people with less effort. Marketing automation helps you cut through noisy inboxes and conversations while developing a personal connection. An archive of call audio is just the way to discover those small things that might seem tangential, but are actually the key to helping you become a star sales rep.
6. Identify red flags and create realistic goals
There’s no doubt that sales is a high-pressure job – 36% of sales reps check their email before hitting the snooze button. It’s easy to get so caught up in the chase for a signature that you hear and see only what you want to. Missing red flags or signals can be costly in terms of both money and time.
When you’re able to listen to conversations in a more objective and logic-driven frame of mind, you’ll see what you couldn’t (or didn’t want to) during the call. Maybe you’ll hear a lead beating around the bush where earlier you heard someone trying to get multiple approvals. Or perhaps you’ll connect the dots on that one lead who’s been pushing the deal to ‘definitely next quarter’ for nearly a year.
Whatever the case, listening to your call recordings can help set the right expectations and identify where you should be investing most of your time.
Cover image by Anandh Ravichandran
