November 11, 2022

How Sales Call Reports Can Benefit Your Business

Sales call reports can benefit your company in many ways. Learn five ways they can set your business up for success.

Reading time: 6 minutes

A sales call report is a written record provided by your sales agent after a phone call with a prospective buyer to highlight all crucial information from the conversation.

Typically, sales call reports include details like the client’s contact information, call purpose, preparation notes, call summary, analysis, and follow-up information.

You can use call reports to analyze the performance of your sales team or track what makes potential clients interested in your offerings.

In this blog post, you’ll learn five benefits your company can receive from sales call reports. Keep reading to find out what they are!

1. Help you understand prospects and market trends

Prospects are those who might become your customers. But how can you determine who shows interest in your offerings and can become prospects through call reports?

During a call, leads can reveal more useful information than you thought. They may point out what they like or dislike about your offerings. Your prospects can also mention their experience with what your competitors offer and this will give you some hints about what you should improve on.

To build a sales call report, you can use traditional paper forms or lead capture software like Novocall. Data from the call reports help you understand how your products captivate potential buyers.

Below is an example of how Hubspot integrates Novocall to present call reports.

As you can see, Samantha’s details have been automatically logged into Hubspot!

By documenting the key points from the call-in reports, you can detect possible flaws in your offerings. You may also pinpoint changes in customer behaviors toward products in your industry. With this, all departments, especially sales, can use the collected data to develop more effective sales strategies and enticing offerings.

Further, you can discover market trends you need to recognize through detailed phone calls with new leads or existing leads. You may also observe patterns in the conversations your sales reps have with customers and discover new opportunities as a result.

2. Improve future sales training sessions

You can use data in a sales call report to better prepare future training sessions for your in-house or virtual assistants. Your sales call reports can also serve as training materials that reveal what your sales team needs to focus on and what they can improve on.

By analyzing call elements like the call summary, you may have an overview of your sales reps’ performance. Such information can help you figure out how sales reps succeed in guiding prospects through a sales funnel. So, you can gather successful tactics into coaching materials for future training.

Call reports also help you detect whose performance doesn’t reach preset goals or metrics. Hence, you can identify problems that lead to failure in sales calls. Such problems may be gaps in knowledge and skills or missing information during calls (e.g., a prospect’s expectations of products).

For example, you may realize that your salesperson spends too long on a sales call but doesn’t get the expected results. This may happen because the message isn’t compelling and clear enough to convert leads into paying customers. However, you can fix this by creating coaching materials that help the agent answer all prospect questions and meet prospect demands.

Based on your sales reps’ call reports, you can amend training methods and develop coaching tools like educational videos or resources that help increase call success rates.

3. Optimize sales processes

A sales process is a range of repeating steps that help move leads from the awareness stage to closed deals. Similar to the benefit mentioned above, you can use effective reports to enhance your sales process.

Analyzing information in the reports gives you better insights into all facets of your sales process. In other words, you can determine where leads are in the purchase journey and how close they are to completed deals. Understanding the information, you may start looking for ways to move leads further in the buying circle.

Also, a sales call report allows you to detect which obstacles exist in a sales funnel. Thus, you may analyze and find proper ways to remove the barriers and convince a customer to purchase.

Sales reps can review their summary and analysis before making follow-up calls. After getting feedback from sales managers for their reports, reps can focus more on the key information during calls. This helps ensure a sales process brings about desired outcomes.

Complement an optimized sales process with excellent marketing efforts from the marketing team to produce the best results.

So, apart from implementing data-driven promotional strategies, the marketing team can use automation to support their marketing efforts.

For instance, they can use marketing automation apps that integrate easily with the brand’s website to help them handle repetitive jobs like sending emails. They can also use marketing automation tools to build marketing workflows or popup forms for lead generation.

4. Ensure employee accountability

Sales call reporting is for ensuring that your sales team is accountable. How so? The reports document what sales reps do or say during calls.

Through call reports, you can review your sales agent’s response to different situations that arose during calls. Ideally, the sales rep should be able to proffer tangible solutions and give you feedback on how they defined and handled the prospect’s request.

If it was a need that could not be addressed in a single call, they should be able to tell you what their next steps will be. Just like Hubspot’s report example below:

Based on the sales rep’s reports, you can identify whether they’re able to move the client further on the sales cycle.

Besides, if your agents meet their sales goals, you can give them positive performance feedback and the incentives they deserve (e.g., bonuses). This motivates them to be more accountable for the success of their calls.

Not all sales reps perform well and gain satisfactory results. But, without determining their weak points early enough, you can hardly provide the help or advice your team needs. As a result, they can become demotivated and lose prospects. This also has a profound impact on your company’s sales results and overall growth.

Frequent analysis of a sales call report can help you detect who isn’t performing at an expected level. Ideally, the sales calls your team makes should have specific objectives. For example, the objective could be to close a sale or educate the customer about your product offerings.

With the sales call report, you can see what the call objective was and if the rep achieved it. Also, reviewing reports helps you understand why some individual reps underperform or have unsuccessful calls.

Grasping information in reports, you can discover what sales reps are struggling with and give them constructive feedback or work with them to find solutions to their concerns.

This helps your sales representatives correct mistakes faster and improve their skills. In turn, the success of your sales reps helps boost the overall growth of your company.

5. Provide insights into user experience

During phone calls, sales reps can record what prospects go through when using your company’s products or services. Based on call summary and analysis, you can understand what prospects think of your product, service, or even customer support. This will give you actionable insights into what you can do to improve your customer’s user experience.

For instance, you may need to include FAQs on your site if customers complain that information is hard to find.

Also, you may realize that prospects and customers have a poor user experience due to your sales team’s responsiveness. Maybe the customer scheduled an appointment from your website and your sales rep took too long to call them. To fix this, you can use sales automation software (like Novocall!).

Automation helps many companies increase their inbound calls by 600% and conversions by 45%. Such software allows you to schedule calls, assign leads to the right sales reps, send call notifications, and more.

Automating a sales process can enhance your team’s productivity and facilitate better response time. Thus, you can meet more of your customers’ needs and close more sales.

Conclusion

Your sales agents are a vital bridge between your business and clients. Their performance can boost or slow down the company’s growth. So, regular review of sales call reports is essential to help you better monitor how they perform during calls.

The reports allow you to determine prospects and product trends with ease. Further, you can understand how responsible your team members are for calls.

The reports also give you insights into user experience through elements of calls. Understanding the information can help you optimize inbound and outbound sales processes. The information can help you determine what strategies need to be changed and which ones need to be retained.

Follow these tips and ultimately, you’ll optimize the use of your sales call reports and reap benefits for your business!

Michal Leszczyński

Michal is immersed in developing, implementing, and coordinating all manner of content marketing projects as the Head of Content & Partnerships at GetResponse. He is the author of more than 100 articles, ebooks, and courses.

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