Sales Call Analytics: The Comprehensive Guide

What are sales call analytics?

Sales call analytics can refer to analytics that pertains to one of two separate components of sales calls. The first component is activity numbers and performance metrics surrounding the calls themselves. The second is a measurement and analysis of the actual sales conversation that occurs on the call. The former is typically knowns as sales conversation analytics, but can be included within a sales call analysis platform.

Sales call analytics provide sales reps, marketers, managers, sales directors, and c-level executives with precise measurements regarding the efficacy, performance, and efficiency of their organization’s sellers on the phone. These analytics stand to dramatically increase the overall performance of a company by providing a holistic micro and macro view that every organizational tier can reference in order to benchmark key performance figures, standardize practices, coach and/or train individual rep and make hiring and/or training decisions in order to increase sales effectiveness.

Sales call analytics also stand to increase the performance of departments that work in tandem with sales, such as marketing, customer support, and success teams. Marketing can utilize sales call analytics to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and calculate a more accurate marketing ROI to make better decisions. Customer support and success can leverage call analytics to understand key contacts within the organization.

How sales call analytics work

Sales call analytics use a combination of sales data, CRM, analytics, and telephony tools via integration or house all necessary components within a single platform. Typically, sales reps will either place their calls using a dialer tool or manually record their call activity. That activity is recorded (automatically or manually) into the CRM in association with the record of the contact that was dialed. In addition to the contact that was dialed, the CRM should store job title and associated company information like size (number of employees and revenue), current sales stack, and prior history.

When the call is placed, sales reps should record all contextual information, as well as the outcome of the call. This contextual information should include the source of the contact information. The source should state whether it was an outbound- or inbound- sourced lead, the specific origin of the call, whether it be a particular ad, content piece, sign, referral partner, event, and so on. The call’s length should be noted, specific topics that were discussed during the sales conversation, as well as follow up tasks. The outcome of the call should also be referenced, with the action that was taken. The sales rep should note if the call was answered or not, if the phone number is accurate and contacts the right person, if there was a gatekeeper involved, if there was no answer, and a voicemail was left, and if there is a follow-up email or another call to make.

The amount of information and the time it can take to record it all is daunting and is liable to be inaccurate or incomplete if entered manually. This is why the vast majority of sales teams elect to use some sort of sales call activity recorder. Sales tools that automate sales call data collection not only save a significant amount of time (allowing sales reps to make more dials each day) but also ensure complete and accurate data.

The data that sales call analytics can provide

Sales call analytics provide incredibly valuable data, analytics, metrics, and reporting for every relevant part of an organization that allow each respective department to supercharge its performance and drive new efficiencies within both their internal and external processes and efforts. This increased performance and efficiency creates a greater return on investment, not only for the sales call analytics tool itself, but also for concurrent applications, platforms, and human efforts.

Metrics and data generated by sales call analytics applications include:

• Dials-to-connection percentage: What percentage of dials made result in a connection?
• Dials-to-appointments ratio: How many dials made by sales reps not only connect, but result in an appointment being set?
• Dials-to-opportunity percentage: How many dials made by sales reps connect, set an appointment, and are accepted as a sales qualified opportunity?
• Revenue from calls per source: Which marketing campaigns and/or sources are generating the most inbound calls? Also, can be used in conjunction with other metrics to determine which marketing efforts are driving the most qualified opportunities and which of those result in won deals.
• Voicemail return rate: When a rep leaves a voicemail, what percentage of contacts who received a voicemail return the call? When combined with a voicemail script or used in conjunction with a legal voicemail drop tool, this metric can also be utilized to A/B test voicemails.
• Number of conversations: How many actual sales conversations does an individual rep or the entire team make each day?
• Call duration: on average, or on an individual basis, how long do reps spend on each call? Used in combination with call outcome metrics, sales teams can determine if reps spend too much time on calls.
• Average call disposition: what is the typical outcome of a sales call?

The benefits of sales call analytics

Sales call analytics offers massive benefits to its individual users, managers, team, parallel business units, department, and the entire company that they are within. As evidenced from the significantly abridged list of metrics provided by call analytics platforms above, sales teams can leverage sales call analytics platforms to drive massive increases in sales performance and effectiveness. Lateral teams like marketing, who drive inbound leads to and compliment sales team activities can also reap the benefits of sales call analytics. Marketing teams can use the data to focus on the campaigns that drive the most qualified leads to sales and can better track what sources they obtain callers from, and where they go once they contact the organization.

Sales call analytics are extremely effective when it comes to reporting, goal-setting, and attainment of those aforementioned goals. For example, if your sales team needs to hit a particular revenue number each quarter, a sales manager can use sales call analytics to understand how many calls are needed to reach that goal. The sales manager can see the team’s average deal size, then use the opportunity close ratio to gather how many opportunities must be created to close the amount need to generate the amount of revenue they must meet. Then, the sales manager can use then use dials to opportunities sales call metrics to understand exactly how many calls must be made to create the optimal number of opportunities. From there, they can see how on average how many calls their reps make each day.

With these numbers, sales teams can determine if they need to add reps, train reps, and other ways they can optimize the effectiveness of their sales team. They can also use sales call analytics to understand how the addition of other sales tools impacts the performance of their team by measuring how many calls reps are able to make in a day, how qualified the contacts they are calling are, and how long they spend on sales calls.

Teams may see that certain reps are dialing a high number of leads, but are not actually connecting. There also may be reps that are dialing less but are simply more efficient at connecting with customers. Sales call analytics allows managers to determine what their best reps are doing, and then ensure the rest of the team follows that standard.

Learn more about sales call analytics

to learn more about sales call analytics, and how they can help your team, contact us to discuss specific ways in which Revenue.io sales call analytics can increase performance, goal attainment, generate better forecasts, and more.