From Call Tracking to Sales Success: a guide for sales managers

Today, sales managers have access to more data than ever. Salesforce login times, calls, meetings, new contacts, new opportunities, Sales managers can monitor anything they need.

Sales operations create new processes and make sure that data is reportable. The more information they create, the more they’ll be able to help top managers make right decisions. Unfortunately, sales leaders didn’t use to have access to this data, which is why they might use it poorly.

How to use click-to-call data?

Let’s say you had the great idea to implement a click-to-dial application for the SDR team. Thanks to you, SDR is now saving time when dialing and will be able to track call activity.  Calls are logged into the system. The sales manager will usually ask you to create a report so he can keep an eye on calls activity. Three weeks later he shouts on an SDR because he did 50% fewer calls than the team average this morning. I know the outcome.

If the sales manager keeps harassing his reps about the number of outbound calls they make, they’ll end up making fake calls. So the sales manager will track call duration and shout again. Now the reps make fake long calls on answering machines. So now the sales manager turns paranoiac – like our Jack here – and try to keep track of fake calls. What went wrong? Sales operations didn’t help them analyze this data.

Analyze the data to help your team crush their quota

Trust me, if the SDR was convinced that he could crush his meetings booked quota by solely making many calls, he’d do it. But maybe this SDR spends more time finding new contacts. Perhaps he spends most of his time on LinkedIn as social selling works for him. Maybe he spends more time writing his email cadence and has much better reply rates than other SDR.

Maybe top performers try to call the same contact 8 times when low performers give up after 2 attempts. Laggards might be stuck with the same lead database for a month when top performers take a whole day to add 50 new qualified leads. Or maybe high performers are calling at the right time of the day.

Sales operations should help managers analyzing why top performers are doing so well. In another post, I write about outbound SDR metrics. Tracking the number of outbound calls won’t help much. As Sales Operations implements tools like click-to-calls, sales representatives will blame them whenever those tools turn against them. And that’s why you should care and help sales managers analyzing data.