Sales Managers: How Do You Ensure Reps Get Better at Pitching Over Time?

The sales pitch is a cornerstone of the sales process. Whether it is on the phone, in person, or through email, your pitch is the crucial first impression. Sales organizations have perpetually devoted time, energy, and resources to improving their pitches, but you can take actions that help gradually improve your pitching over time. We’ve broken down a few things that both Sales Managers and Reps can do.

Use the Right Tools

Managers

To start, you must find and employ tools that empower both you and your reps. The right applications enable reps to coach themselves and improve productivity while giving you the ability to coach at scale. Call recording and playback allows you to listen to every pitch your reps make on your own terms. You don’t have to shadow each rep individually and hope a teaching moment happens.  To help reps improve their pitching, find applications that at the very least provide call recording functionality. However, call analysis is also extremely valuable and can bring your team to the next level. Call analysis allows reps to understand their talk/listen time, call time, opportunities from calls, and  other valuable quantitative metrics that directly contribute to the success of a pitch.

Furthermore, automation tools like dialers, voicemail drops, call logging, and task management increase rep productivity by removing the administrative work from their calls. When you automate the tasks associated with each call, you allow reps to focus on making connections, and spend more time selling.         

Reps

Call recording is an incredibly powerful tool to improve sales pitches, calls, and increase effectiveness. A lot happens on a call — you have to listen to your prospect, think of what to say next, ask the right questions, work towards your goal, and ensure you are getting the right information. Additionally, what you think you are saying clearly may actually sound convoluted to the person on the other end. Recorded calls further serve as complete records when handing off an account or working in tandem with another rep.

Call recording allows you to replay your conversations to ensure you are hitting the right points, handling rejections well, and confirms that your pitch sounds like you think it does. Are you enthusiastic, doing more listening than talking, and actively addressing prospects’ needs?  If your recording tool has a library of recorded calls, you can also listen to the pitches from top-performing reps to learn what works for them and how they handle certain situations. Reps can even listen to each others calls to provide peer-review style feedback, allowing sales managers to easily scale coaching without extra input.

If you have access to analytics features, compare your data with that of your coworkers. Look for the areas you are outperforming your coworkers and those that you are lagging in. Is there a specific metric that you need to improve? What are you doing better, what are you doing worse? Then, leverage call recording to virtually “sit” next to the best reps and see what they do.

Call recording also helps increase productivity. Instead of taking notes, entire calls are saved so you never miss an important point. Revenue.io call recordings are even transcribed so you can easily scan to find relevant information.

Educate and Train

Managers

As with any coaching strategy, education is the key to success. Create sessions devoted to improving your reps’ pitching strategy. However, to be successful, the meetings must occur regularly and cannot take up too much of your reps’ time. Consider blocking off a dedicated 30 minutes every week to coach your reps, ensuring that they don’t have scheduled calls during that time. During these sessions, focus on specific, actionable topics and tactics your reps can immediately apply.

Reps

To improve pitches, reps should work together to provide real-time feedback. Be open about what has been working and what hasn’t. Does a certain feature lead to demos when it’s mentioned? Does a specific job title need to hear different language?  Reps should also work together to discover common asks or rejections, and then find the best way to address them.

Create Applicable Context

Managers

When pitching, the more actionable information your reps have, the more successful they will be. Managers should create a simple framework or guidelines surrounding the information to collect prior to and during a call, as well as how to employ it. Again, using the right tool can provide a significant advantage. For example, Revenue.io’s dialer has the ability to preload call templates to ensure reps take consistent call notes and guarantee necessary information is recorded.

Reps

To improve your pitch, have as much context as possible for each and every call. Understand who you are talking to, what they do, what their company does, and what their pain points might be. Reinforce your knowledge and make the call more personable with research. Search the lead on LinkedIn, see if you have any connections in common, or look at what posts they have liked. You can also check Crunchbase to see what companies they have been involved with. Not only will this information allow you to connect on a more personal level, it gives you the ability to visualize them as a person and create more empathy during this stage of the sales process. Personalization is crucial and can make or break a sale. Each lead’s experience from the first call to their signed contract should be tailored to them so they feel like they are your only client.

When on the call, explain the value of your product, not just its features. Show your lead how it will positively impact them and their company. Also, ensure that you spend more time listening than you do talking. Truly understand what you lead is saying, and read between the lines to see how your product will solve their problems. Listening also makes a potential customer feel more involved and open.