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“Salesforce reports that poor data hygiene costs a typical business nearly 30% of its revenue, amounting to a total economic loss of a whopping $700 billion a year.”- Saleshacker
Sales data is not just important but the heart of majority of sales activities.
Without data, sellers and businesses alike will find themselves lost and annoyed.
Moreover, trailing the competition can become a difficult task and consequently a big blow to the business.
Today, sales teams are surrounded by sales data but unstructured and unorganized data. The reason is simple, while sales teams invest in sales technology they underestimate the power of sales reporting software.
In today’s post, we’ll discuss:
- Importance of investing in a sales call reporting tool
- What is Sales Call Reporting Software?
- How To Choose The Best Sales Reporting Software (16 Questions To Ask)
- Can sales calls be recorded on the software platform?
- Can sellers share the recorded sales calls with others?
- Does sales reporting help in sales rep performance analysis?
- What type of sales call data do you need reporting on?
- Can you build reports?
- Do you have a dashboard available within the software platform?
- Can sellers filter and check specific call moments?
- Can sales reps identify business opportunities from the sales call reporting software?
- Can you customize the sales data fields and reporting?
- Does the software check activity-level data?
- Is the sales call reporting tool for inside or outside sales teams?
- Does the sales reporting tool integrate with other sales tools?
- Is data secured in the sales call reporting tool?
- Can senior leaders make sales playbooks within the sales call reporting solution?
- What amount of customer support is provided for the reporting tool?
- What does the overall customer review say?
Let’s go deeper and understand the importance of sales reporting tools before exploring the questions sales leaders need to solve when purchasing a sales reporting tool.
Sales Data that helps virtual sellers sell bigger, better, and more in 2022
Importance of investing in a sales call reporting tool
Sales data is not a new concept that needs introduction or understanding. However, sales call data is one area of sales data that hasn’t been exploited to its full potential.
Do you agree?
Surprisingly, the data salespeople gather from sales conversations is an excellent source of knowledge. The sales conversations capture;
Imagine, the amount of power a seller receives when they start leveraging the call data shown above. Every statistic, metric, KPI, and other analytics can support informed decision-making and improve sales performance.
Apart from metrics, without an organized sales reporting system, it’s rather difficult to collect essential observations such as;
- Which channels are my buyers hosting sales meetings?
- What time do my buyers prefer to get on a sales call?
- How do buyers want to consume data?
Sales call data offers the privilege of knowing your customer better and tracking their intricacies. When you can close these simple questions and focus on selling, closing the sales quota increases exponentially.
Recommended Read: What should you know about sales quota and its role for sellers?
Today’s discussion will help sales leaders like you make a wise decision about purchasing a sales call reporting tool. But before doing that, we’ll quickly understand the key features of a sales reporting tool that stores and analyzes sales call data.
What is Sales Call Reporting Software?
A sales reporting tool is a simple software solution that helps track sales data. A more advanced and valuable reporting tool gaining popularity in the market is a sales call data reporting tool.
Sales call data is recorded, transcribed, analyzed, and reports are disseminated by the solution.
The tool is suitable for all revenue-generating customer-facing teams in the company but also impacts customer-centric marketing campaigns.
Some well-known use cases and benefits of the sales data reporting software are as follows:
- Access key sales information
- Speed up data entry and recording into CRM
- Circulate information to different stakeholders.
- Sales coaching and sales training are more effective with the support of recordings.
- Across departments, information silos are broken, and market insight is distributed more quickly and streamlined.
- Faster trainee onboarding and ramp-up time.
- Compliance and regulation are under control.
- Performance self-assessment and review are possible.
- Improves data and analysis for follow-ups and qualifications.
You can get more details on the above features and benefits HERE!
How To Choose The Best Sales Call Reporting Software (16 Questions To Ask)
1. Can sales calls be recorded on the software platform?
Call reporting tools need a direct provision to record conversations. The recorded conversations are easily analyzed and reported by the tool.
In some cases, the call recordings from dialers and other web conferencing tools are uploaded to the sales call reporting solution, and the call is analyzed for better insights.
2. Can sellers share the recorded sales calls with others?
A single salesperson never handles the call recordings and reports unless it’s a very low-ticket product or a small-sized account.
In the majority cases, there is more than one stakeholder, and cross-functional collaboration is a common phenomenon.
Recorded calls can be shared with other stakeholders via email.
3. Does sales reporting help in sales rep performance analysis?
The sales reporting tool should report customer-related call data fields and sales reps' performance. With the help of performance reporting, you’ll be able to sort top-performing reps from low performers.
A call performance review will help you:
- Pinpointing the ideal and most effective conversation techniques.
- Benchmarking the calls for coaching.
- Evaluating the sales coaching methods' effectiveness and gaps.
- Sales reps perform the best and might do better with additional practice.
4. What type of sales call data do you need reporting on?
Although there are many call metrics that matter. And these call metrics vary from industry to industry and enterprise to SMBs.
At a basic level, the reporting software should be capable of reporting performance data and offers out-of-the-box simple call statistics:
- Talk ratio,
- Longest rep monologue,
- Longest customer monologue,
- Patience,
- Question rate,
- And Interactivity.
5. Can you build reports?
The whole point of investing in a reporting tool is to receive data in an organized and structured form- in a report form. However, that’s not the concern here.
What you need to understand is- Can sellers create custom reports or use auto-generated reports in the tool?
6. Do you have a dashboard available within the software platform?
The majority of reporting software solutions offer a dashboard along with reporting. However, when making a choice, try to explore the depth of the dashboard and whether or not the platform offers a role-centric dashboard. Every role will need a custom dashboard, and this feature will significantly impact your decision-making.
7. Can sellers filter and check particular call moments?
The importance of a filter is similar to the search function in our phone or WhatsApp contact list. They make the evaluation and review more convenient.
Filters allow sellers and stakeholders to filter call transcripts based on keywords, queries, action items, feedback, discussion topics, and more.
The user can jump directly to the exact time and call when the keyword was spoken.
Do you know how call moments helped a company improve marketing and sales video view time by 60%?
8. Can sales reps identify business opportunities from the sales call reporting software?
Sales call reporting tools to offer various ways to identify business opportunities with prospects and customers. These conversations often get stored as call moments in the sales call reporting platform.
With the help of keyword navigation, sellers can identify the exact moment when the discussion happened during the call. Also, keyword navigation coupled with topics discussed helps sellers track key opportunities.
9. Can you customize the sales data fields and reporting?
The requirement is more pressing when you want to send notes and data to your CRM system like Pipedrive and Freshdesk.
Apart from that, automated call review questionnaires can also be created in the sales call reporting platform.
10. Does the software check activity level data?
Sales reporting solutions generally focus on annual, quarterly, and monthly activities. However, with sales calls, daily activity reporting is equally important.
Not just customer data but sales reps' performance data plays a crucial role in creating better follow-up calls and improvement in performance.
11. Are the sales call reporting tool for inside or outside sales teams?
The sales call reporting tools are more popular and effective for inside sales teams. While making a choice, you’ll also need to chalk out who is using the sales reporting solution?
Additionally, different teams will require different levels and various sales call insights. Not all tools can cater to the inside and outside sales teams.
12. Does the sales reporting tool integrate with other sales tools?
As we discussed earlier, a sales call reporting solution needs to talk to different sales systems such as CRM, dialers, web conferencing tools, calendars, messaging, etc.
The need for CRM and sales call reporting software will become more evident when you read the post on how businesses integrate their CRM systems with call reporting solutions like Convin.
All sales and non-sales teams have access to contact records on the CRM system. Call notes can be automatically pushed to the contact records in CRM tools when CRM and call reporting solutions are integrated. CRM and reporting software will store contact and call data centrally and make it accessible to your sales team.
13. Is data secured in the sales call reporting tool?
A client's business data cannot be kept in an unsecured location and handled carelessly. Many companies have fallen prey to data leaks and cyberthreats, losing millions of dollars. You don’t want to do this.
As part of your evaluation, check the sales call reporting for data security:
- How is data stored?
- Who has access to the data?
- Who all can control the data?
- Is the data encrypted?
- What happens to the data when the reporting solution is talking to a CRM?
14. Can senior leaders make sales playbooks within the sales call reporting solution?
Earlier, sales call reporting solutions never focused on creating benchmarks and industry best practices, but with the competition getting fiercer, reporting solutions are becoming more holistic.
The reporting solutions aren’t giving reports and dashboards as their final product; sales playbook is what the reporting solution wants customers to focus on.
Recommended Read: How to build an A-grade sales playbook using Conversation Intelligence for today’s sales teams?
For example, if a sales rep is performing well every month, the call recording of the rep is distributed to other reps with the help of the sales playbook. New as well as old representatives, can refer to the digital recordings and learn from the top-performing reps.
Organizations developed a sales playbook to accelerate sales numbers and bring more business. But now, the playbooks are helping senior leaders in the creation of a sales process and enabling reps to perform better with minimum effort.
15. What amount of customer support is provided for the reporting tool?
Initial days are easy with handholding and implementation teams available round the clock. But with time, a support team will make your life easier by solving your problems.
One way to identify if the reporting solution vendor has a strong support team is by reading the customer reviews.
16. What does the overall customer review say?
Talking about customer reviews in the earlier section, you mustn't make choices in haste and refer to other customers who have achieved results from the product.
Customer reviews make more sense to identify possible flaws and improvement areas of the vendor. Some may not matter to you but knowing the negative side of the product and brand is equally essential for negotiating.
We hope these questions help you in making a wise decision.
However, we understand many senior leaders need options to get started on the software investment journey, and we can’t disappoint them.
To help you get started, here’s an AI-backed sales call data reporting solution that integrates with your CRM system. Learn more!
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