If there was one function which had to be the engine of your business growth, it would be without a doubt, Sales. No matter how fine your product or service is, you need willing customers to buy your product, at your price and at your terms. Sales makes that possible.
The entire process of sales has to be treated like a funnel containing multiple stages. This is very important in order to measure and improve your sales process. So for example the number of cold calls done or the number of your website-visitors may be considered to be at the top of the funnel.
Owing to the advantages of the online medium, there is sufficient literature on measuring this funnel and improving user experience on websites. Out of various analysis tools, you may know about A/B testing. It is a simple concept where you test different scenarios of user interaction/engagement on your website and depending upon the response you get from the visitors, you decide which the best option is. So for example if you want to increase social sharing of your web content, you can change the location of the social sharing bar on your website in various versions and test out which version worked best for you.
Coming to your offline efforts in terms of calling up prospective clients, it is equally important to do A/B Testing to increase effectiveness of your sales calls. So rather than having a fixed call script, you should opt for different versions of phone call scripts . But before testing, you need to choose your objective and the corresponding metric.
The actual objective should fit with your team and company goals and the metric should be chosen to support the same. So for example, if you are looking for overall growth, the top-line metric should be the number of customers contacted and converted (converted for a trial or a meeting etc). Are you looking to sell a new product which has been recently launched? In that case, focus only on the product related metrics. Maybe you are looking to target the youth segment specifically; filter your metric to just that segment.
Now that the objective and metric has been defined, develop different versions of your sales phone call script. The worst thing you can do is calling up customers without a script or call outline. By a script we don’t mean a word by word description but a way of conversing. For example, you might want to fine-tune the introduction, prepare for various customer questions or responses and so on.
For measuring effectiveness of sales calls, script outlines are one part but rigorously testing different sales call scripts against your chosen metrics is the most crucial part in this entire process.
Please note that before arriving at any outcome, you need to collect a sizeable sample of sales calls. Now coming to the question of how do you actually track the sales call? Well here we can be of assistance. Recordator.com allows recording of phone calls easily without installation of any hardware or software. It works with any kind of phone and all types of carriers. So go ahead and give Recordator a spin to record your sales phone calls. Remember the more you test the more you will get to know about what works, and what doesn’t.
Now go ahead and analyse your data to find out real insights about what actually works for you.
Some important points to note are:
- Ensure that a particular script gets tested over a large enough sample group
- Always measure effectiveness against your benchmark metric
- You can test different aspects of your sales funnel by changing the benchmark metric
- Let your prospective customers tell you which is the correct strategy/script, don’t let your biases creep in. This the beauty of A/B testing
- And finally, want an easier way to record phone calls? Sign up with Recordator.com and get your first 30 minutes of call recording free.
