Inside Sales teams are revenue drivers. Businesses implement CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions in order to track to manage outbound call activities. More successful operations have reached a level of momentum where they can field more sales through inbound calls.

Quality Assurance Is Fundamental For Inside Sales
Quality Assurance Is Fundamental For Inside Sales Teams Pixabay

Whether your business operates on inbound or outbound model, it's important to have some sort of QA solution. That's the abbreviation of Quality Assurance, as noted in the title. QA techs need to have the ability to directly monitor those who pilot the phones on a daily basis. However, it's not a good idea for somebody to just hover over a sales agent. Doing so is a great way to assure they make avoidable mistakes.

Conscious Observation Alters Activity

Even at the atomic level, particles can act differently when they're observed by scientists. If that's the case at the smallest level of molecular reality, how much more is it the case when one considers the complex psychological relationships between employers, employees, and staff designed to keep employees honest.

Sales are already hard enough. Even good salesmen will face a majority of rejections. If a seller at your company manages to convert or up-sell 30% of the calls that come across his cubicle a day, that's actually a pretty average sales rate. In terms of averages, one should expect 30 to 50% conversions. Regardless of the stats you use, the majority of sales calls don't convert.

Sales Stats Can Be Elusive

However, just because average conversion rates are 6 to 10 out of 20 calls doesn't mean you have to rest with that average, or that there isn't room for improvement. It's also worth noting that a single call could produce multiple conversions, depending on the situation and how conversions are defined. For example, say you run a team of sellers for a company like Verizon who take inbound calls of Business to Business (B2B) customers.

One of those customers could buy twenty "lines" of phone service. If each "line" represents a conversion, and that buyer is outfitting his entire team, then one call could produce twenty "conversions", which pay out in commissions for salespeople, and are noted in the statistical data as though said conversions were on an individual basis.

So in that scenario, if a salesperson had twenty calls in a day, only one of those calls was a sale, but it was a twenty-line sale, then he's got a 100% conversion rate even though nineteen of the calls he took went nowhere. However, this is going to differ per businesses. Understandably, some won't consider that a comprehensive conversion rate--and certainly, one chance "lap sale" from a client needing lines isn't definitive of that seller's daily numbers or abilities.

Data must be aggregated and averaged to determine efficacy. If you've got a seller who seems to be doing well in terms of sales numbers, but he really only gets one conversion a month, that salesperson could be coasting off the occasional lap sale and actually costing your company money--said lap sale could have gone to any agent on the floor. That's where call recording software becomes of paramount importance.

Identifying Good And Bad Habits Through Quality Analysis

With a recording of a phone call and a transcript, the habits of the seller in question can be directly established, and even shared throughout managerial meetings. Sometimes they've had a run of good luck, sometimes they've had a run of bad luck. Sometimes such salespeople will serve as examples to other sellers on your team, and you can use their call to help enlighten your sellers toward more effective avenues of conversion.

Similarly, sometimes a bad example can also serve to illustrate what not to do. In general, such departments will be composed of a number of sellers, managers, and QA technicians. With good recording software, QA techs can take sellers aside individually to help keep them on-script, or whatever other corporate needs define sales of an inbound or outbound variety.

Now that just scratches the surface of what can be done through call recording software. Security and data analyses also become available through such tech. The bottom line? In sales, or even customer service, any means of monitoring and improving the quality of employee work is worth considering. While call recordings aren't the only way to do this, they do represent a simple, straightforward way to get that done.