How The Wrong Phone System Impacts The Bottom Line

As a Sales Leader, “a phone system” is usually brought to your attention when there are problems. Your reps complain about not being able to hear clients on calls, your Sales Ops partner complains about call data, and you spend time you don’t have on the phone frustrated with IT who can’t resolve your vendor’s issues. Now, these may seem like mere annoyances but your phone system is critical to your company’s success.

The truth is, I didn’t care about the details of my phone system until it impacted revenue.

Now so long as your team is hitting their number, a phone system might be low on your list of priorities. If your company is growing organically that is great, for the short term. Eventually growth will either slow or start to create process issues. At this point, you will need data to guide your strategy…and you might not have any.

Nothing is ever what it looks like on the surface. If I have learned anything in my sales career, it is to seek out data to guide and shape “gut”-based decisions.

In the past, reps were asked to manually track calls in SFDC or a spreadsheet for mangers. They could use any system them wanted to connect with their clients so long as they hit their number. However, as companies grow they need to figure out what works and what doesn’t. So IT comes to the rescue and implements a phone system. The promise is that you can pick it up, make calls, and you no longer have to worry because the data will be in your CRM when you went to go make your pipeline update.

But say your phone system doesn’t work… what are the risks?

Impact #1: You Throw Your Investment Out The Window

The more mature your team is, the less likely they are to adopt any shiny new tools you buy for them. The reason they won’t is because they are already good at their job so unless the tool works with their workflow, they won’t use it.

For example, enterprise reps rarely take calls from their desks because they are either traveling, giving a presentation in a conference room, or on-site. A bad phone system will only work on a desk phone or over Wifi and is not made for the way reps work.

Honestly, you might not care until you are help accountable for the output. I didn’t feel the pain until one day I was trying to look at pipeline velocity and wanted to know how many times a contact was touched at each stage of the cycle. I was left with only anecdotal information because reps were working outside of the tech stack. So the licenses ended up burning cash and went unused because the tool was never implemented and reps were never on-boarded.

Impact #2: You Don’t Know What Your Pipeline Actually Looks Like

The biggest reason to adopt a phone system is to gain insight into your team’s activities. The best way to gain this insight used to be to go to my rep, look together at deal and ask them when is the last time you talked to a key DM. However, at scale you don’t have time to talk to people one-on-one, their activity needs to be tracked in the system so you can quickly get those key insights.

For example, one of the greatest cause of slippage is reps calling into the wrong person at the late stages of a deal. Reps would call into a sponsor instead of a DM, not wanting to bother someone they had a weaker relationship with. As a result, misinformation from the wrong people caused deal slippage of up to 15% every month. However, the phone system we used wouldn’t capture the correct data into Salesforce in real time so we had no way of tracking if this was happening. We always caught the problem too late.

If the data your phone system is capturing seems incomplete or off, that is a huge signal that you need to switch because operating without insights can seriously impact revenue.

Impact #3: You Don’t Notice Bad Behaviors Until It Is Too Late

What do your best reps do on the phone? They probably make calls on time, do research before hand, take detailed call notes, make calls between demos to follow the deal progression, etc. Any phone system that makes sales feel more transactional and impersonal than in already is will ultimately be a detriment to your Sales team.

Similarly, how often do you dig into your worst deal outcomes. Unsurprisingly, bad behaviors are the biggest contributor to poor deal outcomes overtime.

For example, growing companies often experience a tipping point where more leads come in but demo conversion rates go down. The insights from a good phone system might show that AEs are calling in late to demos. It can tell you if the AEs are over booked because of the increase in demos being scheduled, and therefore calls are spilling over and creating a negative customer experience. Without the right phone system, you cannot see how rep behavior at scale is impacting your bottom line and take action.

So how do you find a good phone system?

1. Performance — You pilot the system and it just works. Your reps love it because it is flexible, works on mobile, and never drops calls.

2. Clarity — The vendor eats, sleeps, and breathes Salesforce integration. Your Sales Ops team has full visibility into the data sync and your data is always easy to find.

3. Success — Your team is properly on-boarded and adopts the dialer. Your IT team never has to answer another complaint from your Sales team because the phone system has amazing service and support.

Want to learn more about how Truly focuses on Performance, Precision, and Success for our customers? Check out our Customer Page or Book a Demo.