New to call tracking? How to leverage call data for performance reporting
These are the 3 call activity reports you should create right now.
Congratulations! You finally invested in a shiny, new dialer that tracks call activity in Salesforce automatically. Now that you’ve got all that data, how will you use it to drive business results?
Thousands of weekly call activities can be overwhelming to work with in Salesforce. On top of the activities themselves, there are dozens of data points on every phone call that you can use to drill down into how your team is performing. Before diving into advanced reports, it’s helpful to get oriented with a few basic reports that will give an idea of what your sales team is doing.
1. Daily Call Volume
The biggest reason to install an automated call tracking system is to have an accurate record of every phone call that happens. The natural first place to start reporting is daily call volume, i.e. of how many calls each member of your team handles per day. There is a lot of tribal knowledge around how many calls per day make for a successful rep (some even say cold calling is a waste of time). Before you enact any rules on minimum calls per day, you need a baseline for your business.
Once you’ve got an idea of activity levels, you’ll be able to start creating more advanced reports that drive a data based decision for minimum daily call requirements. Within a matter of weeks you’ll have answers to some very complex business problems — How many calls turn a lead into an opportunity? How many calls occur before someone reaches a decision maker? How many calls close an opportunity?
2. Daily Talk Time
Pretty much everyone agrees that a few lengthy calls are much better than an onslaught of short calls. Longer calls generally indicate interest, a robust discussion of features and pricing, and a rep that’s spending more quality time with prospects. This report is the precursor to taking that minimum call requirement a step further and setting a goal for actual time spent with prospects each day (outside of faceless emails).
Talk time can then become the fuel behind a variety of other unknowns. How many hours of work is it taking to drive a deal across the finish line? Does one specific rep spend too much time on a deal that will never close? Worse yet, are good deals being left without an actual human touch?
3. Talk Time/Volume by Outcome
Your dialer may have come with something you’ve never encountered — a call “disposition.” Call dispositions are a way to label the outcome of a phone call, typically handled as part of post phone call wrap up. Categorized phone calls show exactly how many calls of a certain outcome happen or how much time was spent on calls at a certain deal stage. Chances are you’d rather someone spent 2 hours a day having pricing conversations than spend 2 hours a day leaving voicemails. Pulling calls of a certain disposition and reviewing them also offers an invaluable coaching opportunity.
Dispositions also provide a wealth of information about the lifecycle of a deal. Why didn’t an opportunity with 3 hours of demo time close? How did an opportunity get to a pricing discussion, hit a roadblock, and never get discussed with a manager? Why are account executives spending hours a week making their own cold calls?
With these three simple reports, you can quickly gain a wealth of insight into your business. Of course, in order to make these reports actionable you need to get data to the right place in your CRM. Learn more about how Truly helps businesses regain trust in their CRM data.
