3 Mission Critical Things You Can Learn From Measuring Talk Time
What does talk time mean and what can it tell you?
Talk time is the single most important metric in the sales organization that very few can measure accurately today.
Talk time means many things to many people. At the broadest end of the spectrum, you have “time spent on the phone”. Drill deeper and you have “time speaking to a prospect”. And even more granular it’s “how much are we talking to the prospect vs. listening”.
Regardless of which of those definitions you choose, you will still find it to be the single most important reporting metric for measuring the effectiveness of your Revenue Operations along three key dimensions: Capacity Planning, Funnel Analysis and Management.
Capacity Planning
We hire people in the revenue organization to do one core activity: talk to prospects and customers. Sure, they will be occupied with doing other administrative tasks, but even then, the organizational objective will always be around maximizing talk time.
Understanding/optimizing resource usage(eg: selling time) is called “capacity planning”. This is a critical measure of success because people are the #1 cost in most businesses; not managing this resource carefully can be the difference between success and ruin.
Many organizations we talk to have reps spending ~25% of their time actually talking to customers. Think about that for a moment. That means that these organizations (subtracting administrative tasks) could cut their sales force by at least half and still operate with the same level of throughput! This could mean several things, all of which need immediate action:
- We hired too early
- Our quota is too low
- We aren’t spending enough of marketing and lead development
- Our administrative burden is just way too high and we need to automate
Talk time, as a single metric, will tell you if any of these questions need answering and how urgently.
Funnel Analysis
Once we know we have the right capacity, we can start asking ourselves how effectively that capacity is being deployed across the funnel.
Acquisition:
- What is our time to call new leads?
- What % of new leads are touched?
- Are we touching leads with the highest probability of conversion?
- Where is our activity level trending?
Acquisition:
- Are we feeding our AEs the right number of opportunities?
- Are we getting stuck in a particular stage of opportunity more often?
- Are AEs focusing their time on the right opportunities?
- What is the maximum # opportunities an AE can handle at once?
- Are these deals actually alive? How confident are we in our funnel reporting and forecast?
Implementation:
- Which customers are showing the least engagement?
- Are we spending time with the right level of seniority early on?
Retention:
- What % of our customer base have we spent time with?
- What % of their book of business can an AM cover in a given time?
- Are we seeing a decrease in engagement by seniority within an account?
- How confident are we in our churn forecast?
All of these ultimately can be answered by understanding which rep is speaking to which prospects, at what stage of the funnel, when and for how long.
Management Initiatives
Action remains the #1 signal for managers to understand where people are spending their time and if their coaching changes that in a meaningful way.
One of our enterprise customers summed this up in a really simple fashion:
“Management is simple. If people are doing good, make sure they keep doing what they’re doing. If people are doing poorly, make sure they keep changing what they’re doing. If people are doing poorly and keep doing the same thing, that’s when you know something is really wrong.”
The effectiveness of your management team is the sum of the output and positive change that they yield on their team. By tracking the actions of front line reps and observing management practices, we can infer where there is a performance problem that needs senior manager guidance.
Have we convinced you?
Now for the shameless plug… at Truly, our mission is the help our customers Learn From Every Conversation. Talk time is one of the most powerful and yet most difficult measures to track given the many ways in which customers and reps communicate. If you want to better understand and manage your reps’ time, we’d love to speak with you! Contact us today.
