There’s a recent wave in sales development and it’s called revenue intelligence. Companies in this space provide technology that analyzes conversations between reps and prospects. The idea behind this is to uncover coaching opportunities, identify the likelihood of a deal closing and discover insights into what your best reps do that leads to the results they achieve.
Solutions like Gong and Chorus claim to produce amazing results for revenue organizations. Gong claims a 27% increase in revenue per rep, a 20% time saving (presumably in reviewing calls for coaching purposes) and a 53% reduction in onboarding time. Sounds great. The only problem is these things are expensive. Generally $1000s of dollars per rep every month.
If you’re in a scrappy startup and want to get some of these insights without the cost, here's how to go about it. Make your contact stages and call dispositions much more granular.
A typical sales organization may have contact stages for prospects that look something like this:
New
In sequence
Not interested
Sequence ended - No response
Meeting booked
Bad data
Wrong person
Nurture
These stages don’t provide managers with a lot of insight into why the prospect wasn’t interested. And therefore it’s difficult to dissect where you need to focus your effort to generate better results.
What we do at Sales Science is make these contact stages much more granular. Here’s a look at some of the contact stages we use:
New
In sequence
Not interested - budget
Not Interested - inhouse
Not Interested - not a priority
Not Interested - no reason
Not Interested - competitor
Info request
Call back - time agreed
Sequence ended - No response
Meeting booked
Bad data
Wrong person - no referral
Wrong person - referral
You can see with this stage breakdown you’ll get better insights into why prospects aren’t moving through the funnel. Is there a specific objection your reps are struggling to overcome? You can also compare reps - assessing how their contact stages compare to their peers, are they struggling more with prospects saying it’s not a priority for example? You can also make better decisions around how to approach these prospects in the future based on their contact stage from the previous attempt. And finally call coaching is much easier as you’ll be able to drill in to calls that you want to review and train on based on the contact stage.
We also make call dispositions much more granular in order to understand where the call ended. Here’s what a typical company might use for call dispositions:
No Answer
Voicemail
Call Back
Meeting Booked
Live Message (Gatekeeper)
Bad Number
Connected
Again, these call dispositions provide very little information if we wanted to review calls, or the call disposition data to see where we need to focus on improving our cold calling efforts. Here’s how we set these up at Sales Science:
No Answer
No Answer - GateKeeper would not transfer
Voicemail
Live Message (Gatekeeper)
Connected - Call Back
Connected - Info Request
Meeting Booked
Not Interested - Rejected Into
Not Interested - Rejected Problem Statement
Not Interested - Rejected Questions
Not Interested - Rejected Close
Bad Number
Wrong Person
By making these more granular we can get much better insights into which stage of the call our reps are getting shut down. This helps us to determine whether we need to make changes to scripts or provide additional coaching to certain individuals. It also helps us benchmark call performance across reps and the accounts we’re working.
So if you don’t have the budget for Gong or Chorus, spend some time making your contact stages and call dispositions a little more granular. You’ll save a ton of time in call reviews and make better decisions on what to focus on to improve outcomes.
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