5 Ways That Call Recording Benefits Sales and Marketing Teams

Dashboards and analytics give sales managers, sales coaches, and marketers a great deal of insight into the performance of reps, but sometimes there’s really no substitute for actually listening to phone calls.

Call recordings allow managers to listen on their own schedule, instead of wasting time randomly listening to live calls with the hope of catching a teachable moment. When utilized with specific objectives in mind, reps can gain deep insight into sales and marketing efforts without violating  prospects’ trust.

Here are 5 ways that recording calls can improve both sales and marketing performance: (learn more about best practices and the legality of call recording).

Improve Sales Training

By listening to a cross-section of calls by each rep, sales managers can get granular insight into each rep’s individual performance. Are reps overcoming objections? Are they hitting key talking points? A call recording can help managers identify every rep’s strengths and weaknesses.  Therefore, managers can do a better job of providing each rep with personalized training. With proper coaching, each rep can reach their maximum potential and do a better job of meeting sales goals.

Improve Sales Strategy

Sales managers can use call recording to continuously optimize sales strategies based on real-life scenarios. Recordings enable managers to hone in on crucial strategic questions such as:

• What common questions are prospects asking?
• Which objections are continuously being raised?
• How are reps successfully overcoming obstacles?

Improve Marketing Messages

Marketers often create content based on which messages they think will resonate with leads, without ever hearing an actual sales call. But by listening to call recordings, marketers can identify real-world pain points and sales objections. With Zoom call transcription, it’s even easier to understand what comes up in conversations. Marketing can then craft collateral to help reps overcome those objections.

Give Marketing Deep Insight into Lead Quality

Is your Marketing department handing off “qualified leads” to Sales that are far from sales-ready? If so, it could mean that leads require more incubation from marketing prior to hand-off. Listening to call recordings give marketers insight into lead quality. If necessary, marketers can redefine their qualifying metrics to provide Sales with more qualified leads.

Audit Audio Quality

Your sales reps can deliver the best messages in the world, but it doesn’t matter if leads can’t properly understand them. We’ve all had conversations where the person on the other end sounded like they were standing on top of Mt. Everest. It only causes frustration and you are definitely going to miss the point of the call. Recording calls enables you to spot-check the audio quality of calls to make sure they are up to your company’s standards. 

Call Recording Best Practices

Call recording is generally legal on a federal level, but there are specific variances on the rules from state to state. Federal law allows call recording as long as one party to the conversation gives consent. This would mean that as long as your sales reps are aware their conversations are being recorded, it would not be required by law to make prospects or customers aware that calls are being recorded.

As a best practice, we recommend that if you make all parties aware when recording phone calls. First of all, there are currently twelve states that have issued two-party consent laws, in which all parties to a conversation must be made aware that the conversation is being recorded.

The FCC identifies the following three ways as accepted forms of notifying parties that the call is being recorded:

• Prior written or verbal consent of all parties
• A verbal notification before the recording is made
• An audible beep repeated at regular intervals during a call

Of these, the most common—and recommended—practice is to simply verbally notify customers that the call is being recorded for quality assurance. Customers can then make up their mind whether or not to continue with the conversation. After all, reps should always endeavor to build client relationships built on mutual trust.