This Is What Happens When You Don't Capture Sales Call Data

Today’s post is by Eric Esfahanian, chief revenue officer of Gryphon Networks.

 

 

Nowadays, a lack of meaningful visibility into reps’ daily phone calls is a plague affecting sales managers leading teams of all sizes.

According to research conducted by The Brevet Group, only 33 percent of organizations say their sales goals were met in the past two years. However, the research also found that the majority of relevant sales interactions still happen over the phone.

With that in mind, it’s clear the telephone is the richest source of intelligence into the behaviors of your reps and customers. And, if you can’t capture, measure, or manage data related to daily sales calls, you’re potentially missing major insights that could be leveraged to earn you thousands or even millions more in revenue.

This visibility gap between a rep’s call activities and revenue is due to a lack of ability to capture sales call data and rapidly interpret it in a targeted, contextual way. HubSpot reports 40 percent of sales teams are still using manual spreadsheets to track sales-activity data, and almost 30 percent of salespeople report spending more than an hour each day on data entry.

No wonder sales managers still tend to rely on old-fashioned gut instincts, hunches, and historic trends to inform their decision making.

Here’s the thing: Technology can now automate sales activity data into easy-to-understand, actionable insights. So why aren’t more managers using such solutions to guide and drive standards to improve performance?

Companies tend to forget that the sales call data produced by reps is company property. You’re either using it or wasting it. As Forbes has reported, 62 percent of CRM is estimated to become cloud-based by 2018. This means now is the perfect time for sales leaders to look to the cloud for device-agnostic telephony that simplifies, standardizes, and automates your capture of phone-based activity from your sales force – whether captive or independent.

Overlooking sales call data is like a farmer playing Fortnite for 11 months out of the year instead of nurturing and cultivating their crops to maximize output come harvest time in October. As crazy as that may sound, managers do it every day when they rely on pipeline management instead of measuring and optimizing daily sales call data.

Remember: If you can’t accurately measure your sales activity, you can’t interpret or improve it. And that’s kind of the purpose of a manager, after all.