The lifeblood of any organisation is the ability for it to sell and generate revenue. Of course retaining customers is as important as acquiring customers. Whether your sales staff are hunters or farmers you’re trying to drive average order values, lead generation, conversion rates and customer retention rates.
How can you turn your B players into A players? How can you recruit more effectively and efficiently? How can you turn sales calls into podcasts?
In this short guide, we are going to talk about three ways in which you can re-imagine sales training and enable better coaching of your teams.
Step 1 – Hire Sales Professionals Using Audio Profiles
Instead of back and forth email, use voice notes in one-to-one chat to attract and engage candidates in your talent funnel. Your hiring committee can play back audio profiles to accelerate decision making. There is no need for your hiring team to waste time scheduling telephone interviews. Voice makes your hiring process more personable for both you and your candidate.
Step 2 – Coach your Sales Team using Voice Notes
You can’t use Slack and email when you’re driving your car, it’s simply impossible and against the law. There is a lot of dead time spent in cars so how do we turn this dead time into productive time? Connected cars with Bluetooth allow you to voice message colleagues.
There is the sales forecast in the CRM but actually getting a sales rep to speak out their sales forecast is more believable and more credible. Again, voice messaging conversations can be done one to one or one to many with the whole organisation.
Management wants to avoid the Chinese whispers in business where he said she said they said. Voice messaging in your salesforce gets to the customer truth and make better decisions. Conversational analytics overlaid with CRM and financial data allows you to make better decisions.
Future leaders can be identified and bad news can be delivered early and authentically. Don’t get me wrong, the CRM is a useful tool for the modern salesforce and email is not going away. However, listening to the voice of a salesperson and how their day has gone well, management can support and encourage just in time.
Step 3 – Magnify your Sales Staff with Podcasting
People buy from people. We’ve heard this time and time again but what if you took your best sales staff and turn them into podcast presenters interviewing your customers and your prospects.
Cold calling is hard and requesting a meeting often leads to rejection. But when you turn the table and you ask a prospect to be invited to a podcast more conversations happen.
Getting your top sales people with their personalities hosting podcasts is a brilliant way to establish a personal connection with your client but also a wider audience. Furthermore, junior members of the sales team can listen to these podcasts. Perhaps one day once they’re trained up and have achieved the appropriate results they too can start their own podcast?
You can get your very own Sound Branch branded voice site for your organisation here:
http://soundbranch.com/sign-up-business
PS On your voice site you can hire using voice notes and audio profiles, send voice messages for internal communications and create podcasts with no editing needed.
PPS Artificial intelligence on the platform saves time with life transcription to reduce administration and sentiment analysis to understand the emotions in teams. Artificial intelligence such as live transcription reduces administration time. Sentiment analysis AI allows you to see your the emotions in your teams.
Author Bio
Sean Gilligan is a UK based entrepreneur and author of the book “Flexible”. Sean for the last 15 years has run Webanywhere in Chicago, Leeds and Katowice Poland. Sean is number 67 in the Worldwide Listing of Corporate Learning Movers & Shakers 2018. Sean is a bootstrapper and has not taken on outside capital to grow Webanywhere in 3 countries and has recently founded Ventures Anywhere his start up arm which includes Sound Branch.