You’ve probably heard of Conversation Intelligence Platforms — maybe you are an early adopter or are thinking about one. Either way, you are not alone — Sales Leaders and Execs have been flocking to these platforms lately. The formula is pretty simple: The VP/Director/Manager gets a cultivated view of every demo/call…and magically their Sales Reps close more deals.
The promise of being omniscient is so enticing that most leaders are skipping fundamental steps while rushing to implement these platforms.
The “Science of Call Recording” starts with fundamental building blocks + best practices that you mustn’t forgo to ensure you realize the value of the investment. You are likely familiar with “this call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes” announcements when calling your Credit Card company’s fraud department…but this is different. Let’s dig into it.
When Is Call Recording Used?
Call recording is ideal for any organization that uses the phone to communicate with customers. This is a wide swath and encompasses most companies. From SMB to Enterprise Sales, Account Management, and Customer Success — there are at least some touches + conversations via the phone. They can be Inbound (prospect/customer calls you), Outbound (you call them), or via Conference Call/Screen-share (all parties join a shared line or web meeting).
For example, in order to close a deal — an inside sales team for a SaaS software company might have the following phone interactions with prospects:
- Inbound call from prospect (toll free)
- Outbound call in response to an inbound request (web/email)
- Discovery call to qualify prospect
- Call with a sales rep to further qualify
- Product Demonstration call (usually via web meeting/conference call)
- Call to Internal Champion
- Proposal/Financial Call
- Follow up calls to close deal (might include SMS)
- Closing Call/Signature
- Thank you call — onboarding/implementation/handoff
These calls happen in a myriad of places: desk phone, mobile phone, web-based phone, conference call line, web-meeting/screen-share, or conference room phone. Tracking and recording all of these interactions is the crux of call recording.
Get Started With Call Recording
Use this five-step plan to begin call recording:
1) Identify What You Want To Gain
Figuring out your goals might be the most important part of the process — without this information, you can’t get stakeholder buy-in, budget, or rep adoption.
Examples of gains: Decreasing rep ramp-time (Sales Training + Enablement), Improving Win Rates (Sales), Accelerating time-to-close (Sales), Detecting/Reducing Churn (Customer Success), and Product Feedback (Product/Marketing).
2) What’s your Stance on Compliance?
Once you’ve figured out that you want to leverage Call Recording — it’s imperative to understand your company’s Compliance needs.
The decision is binary — either you want to be compliant or not. The laws are clear on the details.
Whether you are a start-up or Public company — your industry, investors, executives, and legal departments all have a vested interest in compliance.
Some companies disregard the rules, but for those who want to be compliant — we’ve compiled a guide here: Compliant Call Recording — The Ultimate Guide
3) How to capture (Assess your unique workflow)
The more you capture, the more effective Call Recording can be. Antiquated platforms included hardware and were on-premise — where most solutions today are Cloud-based and integrated with internal CRM’s. (ex. SalesForce.com) The integration with CRM allows you to create centralized views of recordings (typically downloadable) and associate recordings with Activities + Accounts. (i.e. “Discovery Call with Richard Hendricks, CEO of Pied Piper).
The workflow and technology components of capturing call recordings can be more complex.
It might be helpful to consider these variables:
- How do your reps make the the majority of their calls? (deskphone, mobile, conference room)
- Do they initiate the calls from CRM or Gmail (via click to dial) or manually enter in phone #’s on a device?
- Out of all the calls they make — how many are with multiple individuals on the call?
- Does the team use Local Presence dialing?
- When they use conference room phones — how do they track the call in CRM?
- Is call-quality a concern for your team? Do calls experience disruption?
4 ) Choose your tool
Vendors that offer call-recording as a part of their offering abound. Remember that legacy call recording was born from the On-Premise Call Center space and usually involved hardware + that pesky announcement. If you are making Outbound calls, the workflow is different and most teams are using cloud-based voice or mobile phones.
Since there isn’t a Gartner Magic Quadrant to review — G2 Crowd is likely the best alternative.
5) Rolling it out — getting Adoption
To get the most out of your Call Recording solution — everyone needs to be on board. From Sales Leadership, Sales Ops, to the reps themselves. Communicating early and often is alway s a best practice. Starting with the CEO is never a bad place.
Identify the core team of influencers: there are those who will be happy to jump on the the new initiative. Get them onboard early and get the internal support they bring with them.
- Create the Timeline: get ahead of the calendar with trainings and briefings. Use regular sales meetings along with 1:1’s and team meetings to convey the message and purpose of using call recording in the organization.
- Circle Back: Show the team some wins early and often. Encourage use by showing the value of the new initiatives. Example: a call recorded with an AE was used by Product team to influence the roadmap for next quarter.
This approach to implementing call recording in your organization will help ensure that you, your team, and your company, maximize the value of call recording. If you’re ready to take the next steps and need more detail, check out our Ultimate Guide to Call Recording.
