How to Optimize Sales Call Messaging for Inside Sales Reps

Revenue.io offers a lot of tools that can help inside sales reps connect with more prospects. But unless reps are delivering the right messaging, more conversations won’t lead to more revenue. As a sales coach, one of your most important duties is to not only ensure that reps have the tools they need to succeed, but also deliver the right sales messages.

Our customers often ask us what are the best ways to drive more sales revenue. To that end, here’s some best practices on call messaging. These actionable tips can you optimize your call messaging to maximize revenue.

Step 1: Identify Underperforming Reps

We like to tell sales managers to begin with analytics. Revenue.io offers dozens of plug and play call analytics dashboards that help managers identify coaching opportunities. Hopefully you have some reps on your team who consistently hit and exceed their numbers. But you may have other reps who are falling short of their goals. Try to examine why these reps aren’t making their numbers. As an example, if a laggard SDR is dialing far less prospects than your A-players, it might be as simple as instructing that SDR to make more dials per day.

Step 2: Listen to Calls

But often there are issues that can’t clearly be gleaned from dashboards. You might have two SDRs who are making roughly the same amount of dials and having around the same amount of conversations each day. However, one SDR might be booking three times as many meetings. In such cases, managers need to get in the weeds and listen to reps’ messaging. Revenue.io offers a couple ways to do this. For starters, you can always listen to call recordings, which are logged against call records in Salesforce. But another fantastic way to hear your reps as they pitch is listening to live calls. If you want to hone in on a particular rep’s calls, you can even use our monitor feature to follow their call stream.

Step 3: Identify Messaging Issues

By listening to reps as they pitch, you can identify potential red flags that are standing in the way of their success. As an example, you might notice that a rep is just pitching without asking questions to discover which business drivers are important to that prospect.

Here are some questions to ask to help you get started evaluating your reps’ messaging:

• Are they always offering value?
• Are they listening to prospects enough?
• Is the information they’re presenting relevant to the prospect’s role?
• Are they asking the right sales questions?
• Are they qualifying prospects quickly enough?
• Do they sound confident?
• Are they able to intelligently answer prospects’ questions?

When you identify issues, Revenue.io makes it easy to offer instant feedback in Salesforce!

Step 4: Refine Call Messaging

Once you’ve identified that a rep’s messaging is off, it’s time to roll up your sleeves, put on your coaching hat and help them win. One of the best ways to help improve reps’ messaging is to do a persona exercise. This is something we regularly do with our own sales reps here at Revenue.io. Sales leaders and marketers can work together to help identify the common roles that you are selling to. Then, you can document what tends to be important to each role, what common questions they might ask are, what are some common sales objections and ways to get around those objections. As an example, say you sell social media marketing software. You might identify that you commonly sell to CMOs, Director of marketing and social media managers. Each role is going to have different needs, ask different questions and raise different concerns. But by documenting the process, you can help reps tailor their messaging more effectively to different sales roles.

Step 5: Test Messaging

Marketers routinely love testing messaging, whether it’s A/B testing CTAs on a landing page or email subject lines. But it’s just as important for salespeople to test messaging. Since almost all inside sales reps use the phone and email to engage with prospects, one way to test messaging is by seeing which emails elicit the most responses. Messaging that is inspiring prospects to respond to emails will likely work during phone calls as well.

Another tool that Revenue.io offers reps is our Voicemail Drop tool. This saves time by enabling customers to leave voicemails with a single click. But, perhaps even more importantly, it empowers reps to test which messages are getting the most call backs. This is a great way to discover which value props really resonate with customers. If a particular message is inspiring way more calls back, see if you can be worked into a pitch.

We have a lot of tools that can help your reps get more opportunities to go to bat. By following these steps, you can help your reps optimize their call messaging and hit more home runs!

For more actionable sales coaching tips, download your free eBook: The 90 Day Inside Sales Success Plan!