Lesson 53 - Review Your Calls

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Regularly reviewing your sales calls is crucial for self-improvement. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to evaluate your calls for messaging, tone, and effectiveness. Your assignment will involve reviewing and critiquing one of your recent sales calls using a provided checklist.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, in today's lesson, you'll review two recent customer calls and take notes on how you can improve your presentation and communication skills. Reviewing recent customer calls is an excellent way to improve as a sales professional. Think of it like field tape review. If you're playing football, basketball, soccer, any type of activity, it can be incredibly valuable to review field tape after the game to understand what went well and what didn't. Reviewing your calls is exactly like that. You're going to take a look at it and understand where you can improve. Now, a lot of people will say, Nick, I don't actually record my customer calls, or we don't record our calls here, and that's fine if a customer is specifically asking you not to record a call, but let me give you six reasons why you should record your customer calls. Number one, it can cover your ass. If a customer comes to you, they come to your boss and say, Well, you know, Karen promised me that I could have these at $14 per license. She told me I could have a 50% discount. She told me we could do this on a one year contract. It's basically their word versus yours. And even if your manager trusts you, which they should, it still just creates an unnecessary friction where there doesn't need to be one, right? So if you have a call recorded, you can quickly and easily go back to that part of the conversation to clear up any confusion. Number two, when you record your calls, you can stay present during the conversation. If a customer is talking and you're taking notes the entire time, it's good. It shows that you're listening, but you're not really present with the customer. Whereas, if you're recording the call, you can have an AI assistant who can give you a transcript later. You can review the transcript later yourself, and you don't have to take notes in the moment. Number three, recorded conversations give you that field tape review, which I kind of just talked about, but ultimately, it allows you to analyze your performance, identify what went well, and highlight areas for improvement. Number four, it allows you to go back and review previous interactions. So let's say that you've just inherited an account. You want to be able to go back and see what all has been said to this account in the past. What were the conversations like? How much have we talked to our champion? And you want to be able to kind of understand where did we leave off? Same thing if you're passing an account over to an SE or a CSM to help you, they need to be able to understand, well, what was said on that previous call. If a sales development rep is passing it over to a sales rep, they need to the sales rep needs to be able to understand what was said on that previous call. So being able to kind of review those past interactions is incredibly valuable, and you can only do that if you record the calls coaching from your manager. So if you record a call, you can submit that call to your manager or snippets of that call to your manager and ask them for coaching. Now, if the thought of your manager being listening in on your calls and coaching you scares you. I would actually push back and challenge that. I think that you should lean in to manager coaching. It's only going to make you better, and it allows your manager to feel involved with your progress. It allows your manager to be an active participant in helping you to succeed, and it shows coach ability and professionalism on your part. Also your manager is fairly experienced, and they can help you with these things. So always good to get manager coaching or new hire buddy coaching or mentor coaching, and then finally, it allows you to celebrate and share best practices. Some of my favorite trainings have been ones that I've put together where I got to show gone call recordings of people that have done a kick ass job of discovery or demos or presenting a business case, right? And it's so fun to see all of their peers celebrating them and saying, Wow, that was an amazing job of handling that objection or taking out that competitor, right? So recording calls can allow you, can allow you to celebrate and share best practices. All right? Are you convinced yet? Because if you can't tell I think you should record every single one of your customer calls or prospect calls, unless they tell you otherwise. Now, when you are reviewing a recorded call, here are the things you want to look out for. One talk time, how much are you talking versus how much is the customer talking? Because if you're dominating the conversation, that's not the right way to do things. They need to be the ones talking the most. You should be playing the role of listening. Right? Obviously, there's an exception. There are exceptions depending on the call. If you're presenting a demo or a business case, you'll probably be doing more talking, but if it's a discovery call, they should be doing the vast majority of the talking questions. What types of questions are you asking? You should be writing down, okay, the questions that I'm asking, Are they open ended, or are they closed ended? Am I asking yes, no, questions that aren't going to get me anywhere. Or am I asking questions like, tell me about explain a time when, describe what happens when you know open ended questions that lead to further conversation. Value exchange? Are you giving value and giving value in return? Are you offering insights? Are you offering solutions, case studies, resources, testimonials? Are you talking about industry, industry trends, right, best practices that you've seen from other prospects? Are there moments where the customer seems particularly interested or disinterested or disengaged? Are you noticing enthusiasm? Are you noticing that they're nodding along? Are you noticing concern or hesitation or a look of cynicism? Sometimes, when I re watch a call that I thought went really well, I'll be like, Oh, wow, that actually did not go well. Actually, they're giving me a look of like, hesitation or concern the whole time. Who has control of the conversation? Are they allowing you? Are they creating derailments? Are they turning this into a success call or a support call? Or are you driving the conversation forward with momentum, with the goals that you're looking to achieve, making sure that you're steering towards the outcomes that you want. If the call is a presentation review, your presentation style? Are your presentations interactive? Are you engaging them in discussion? Are you asking them questions? Are you involving them, or is it just the you show? Is it you just lecturing them over and over, with no interaction whatsoever? Listen for any objections or competitor mentions and write them down. Do they mention a competitor? If so, how are they talking about that competitor? Do they seem happy with their offerings. Are there opportunities for you to differentiate your solution more effectively? And then finally, when you review the end of the call, ask yourself, am I setting clear next steps every call should be moving the deal forward, right? Yeah, make sure there's a concrete plan for action to help you review your calls, you should absolutely be using some sort of AI tool if you're using Gong. Gong will give you AI embedded so after during the call, you can view the transcript. You can search the transcript. You can, you know, see next steps. You can see highlights. You can see how often you were talking versus how often they were talking, in case you can't tell, I think Gong is a very powerful tool. I don't work for them in any way whatsoever, but I've used them at a lot of organizations, and they're valuable. The other thing though, is that you don't need gong or a tool like that. You can just record your call with Zoom, download the transcript, and then upload the transcript to chatgpt, and chatgpt will analyze that transcript and give you an overview. And you can even ask chatgpt, hey, here's what I'm doing. Here's the outcome I'm looking to achieve. I'm a salesperson for XYZ company. Tell me how good of a job I did and what I could have done better. And chatgpt will analyze that transcript and give you some tips. You can also upload a transcript to AI and ask AI specific questions about it. How often did I talk versus the customer? How many? Give me a list of all the objections they raised. Give me a list of any competitors mentioned. Give me a list of all the discovery questions I asked, right? And that will help you quickly and easily analyze the parts of the call that may have gone well or not. You shouldn't just be watching your own calls. Watch your peers calls, watch your managers calls, watch your CEOs calls, if they'll let you Right. Any calls that you can get your hands on to understand what good looks like or what bad looks like that you can learn from you need to understand what's going on out there when people are actually talking to customers? I have always said, and I've been a sales trainer for a long time, I've always said I would rather scrap every single lesson that I give you and only have you watch customer calls if I could choose between one or the other. Customer calls are so important, it's really, really important that you watch your own your peers, to see how these are going, or how they're supposed to go. All right, now it's your turn for today's assignment. You are going to review two recent calls and identify two strengths and two weaknesses from each call. You'll have a mentor or. Manager also review these calls and provide feedback. Then you'll review two calls from someone else, and again, take notes on what went well that you'd like to learn from and implement in your own sales technique. Yeah, and your study guide is going to walk you through all of this, and that is it for today's lesson on the daily quota. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time you.