Guided Intelligence Can Help Sales Managers In The Work-From-Home Environment – InsuranceNewsNet

Managers are faced with enormous challenges in today’s work-from home sales environment. Managers face the challenge of seeing what is happening with sales reps when they are not at work. Managers must provide constructive feedback and real-time coaching to sales reps. Finally, time is a challenge for managers because they must be relevant to every rep on every call.

Research shows that over half of sales reps are actively looking for a new job. This creates a talent gap and presents an onboarding challenge.

The great resignation is not over. With this mass exodus, potential sales are being lost along with a wasteful of lead cost.

Sales managers are constantly on the line, managing data, assigning leads and tracking activity, and driving sales (as best they can).

What can the industry do?

Although three approaches are most commonly used, each has its own set of problems.

1. Call recording. This is an important part of sales management. However, managers are overwhelmed with too many unstructured data to efficiently process it all. If a manager has six sales reps and each one talks for 20 minutes each, then they have 60 hours worth of recorded calls to listen each week.

Managers must be able to identify the key elements of each sales call and listen to them as a sales coach or forecaster.

It would be a time-saver for reps, as their customer relationship management system would automatically update and allow them to be relevant on every call.

2. Transcribing recorded conversations. Virtual selling is becoming the norm. Virtual selling is not for everyone. Zoom calls (or similar) could be an option. The CRM should allow the manager access to all participants, and enable them to hear their voices.

This sounds reasonable and technologically feasible in 2022.

Here’s the thing.

Six pages of transcripts are generated for each hour of recorded calls. Your printer will hate you for the 360 pages that you print each week!

The CRM solution should include the See, Hear and Read function. This allows managers to log in from anywhere and at any time, click on the most relevant parts, and see, hear, and/or read everything that was said.

3. Key word spottingThis is an attempt to highlight the part of recorded calls that the manager should want to hear. This sounds quite reasonable, but it’s not! You might be wondering why?

Time!

If each hour of a recorded conversation generates six pages worth of printed transcripts, how long will it take for a manager or supervisor to listen to a 1-hour call with a 50-seat repcenter? Who has that much time?

And who are you listening to? There are only so many places on a call where the manager can identify where and how the rep could have done it differently or pick up something that the prospect said. Isn’t the most important fact about any given talking point the length?

Key word spotting is inaccurate. You can read the user feedback on any CRM platform that follows this philosophy.

The key is the duration. Managers can spend their time determining what the rep can do differently next time they call. This is determined by how long a particular point has been discussed or not. Is this not the only place where the rep can effect change?

Reps can improve their performance by receiving real-time, actionable, and example-based coaching.

We are now back at the beginning. Sales managers today face enormous challenges in the work-from-home environment. The number one challenge for sales managers is to be able to provide their reps with insightful and helpful feedback. Reps must be able to give them helpful feedback that they will appreciate.

CRMs today need the most current technology, relevant content, and coaching tools to enable managers to connect with today’s work-from home sales environment.

Lloyd LoftonIs the founder ofPowerBehind the Sales.He is the authorThe Salesheros Guide to Handling Objections,BookAuthority.Lloyd has voted this book as one of the 11 Best New Presentation books to read in 2020.[email protected].