Every outbound contact center wants to close more sales, but success is never defined by the number of calls made. It’s always about the quality of customer interactions. But how do you know your sales team is engaging with the prospect in the right way? Listening to these calls and offering feedback is one way to supercharge your sales performance. In other words, performing sales quality assurance can get you the information needed.
Sales Quality Assurance should be a systematic approach to analyzing the sales conversations of your team whether they are taking place on calls, chats, emails, or other mediums. Regular feedback analysis can improve the performance of your team, boost the response rate, close more deals and increase upsells.
Regular sales QA can also enable you to improve the training program of your agents and help them perform better which would ultimately boost your sales.
Getting Started with Building a Sales QA Program for Sales Performance
There are three key components of sales quality; Is the agent effectively discovering and presenting the opportunity, is their presentation compliant, and finally, is it efficient in keeping the contact engaged and avoiding errors that could result in a conversion being lost or delayed? These components must all be in line to ensure the interactions of your sales team align with the sales goals and comply with the quality standards.
Whether you are a sales, lead generation, service to sales, or any other business, consider these tips to launch a successful sales QA program for your contact center:
Define Your Sales Goals
Everything starts with goals. Visualize what you want your team to achieve and which direction you want them to go. These goals will define who you are as a customer service team, what standards you want to set, and what KPIs to measure.
Set a Sales Scorecard
A sales scorecard is like a measure of the performance of your sales team whereby you can determine the areas of their growth.
To set a scorecard for sales conversation:
Create Rating Categories
The rating categories cover everything you are expecting your sales team to achieve. Consider these categories as an example:
- Tone and engagement
- Accurate discovery and product information
- Appropriate sales proposal
- Adherence to the internal processes
Choose the Rating Scale
Now it is time to choose the scale, which will determine your choice of evaluation. Setting up the scale is all about finding the sweet spot. The smaller the scale, the easier it is for reviewers to understand when to use these scores.
As you keep on adding scoring options, your review results will become detailed. It is mostly the managers who are responsible for sales reviews. Some companies hire dedicated sales trainers for this job while others use peer feedback for managing workload and boosting team morale.
The simpler your scorecard, the more meaningful it is. It will help your agents improve their performance. The purpose is to find areas of growth in your team, offer constant feedback, and help them close more sales deals.
Gather Team Feedback
Before rolling out the call center quality assurance QA process, make it a standard procedure to let your team know that their feedback is welcomed and encouraged. This will give your team a sense of ownership and they will provide first-hand insights into the process. This information will help the QA team spot areas that need improvements and tweak the strategy accordingly.
You Are Ready to Implement
Once the scorecard is ready, it is time to plan the implementation for QA and sales performance management. The launch must include the following:
- Involving advisors in the development of the quality assurance program
- Communicating the purpose and objectives of the program to all stakeholders
- Explaining the questions and scoring criteria
- Briefing the stakeholders about the benefits of the program to the organization and other stakeholders
Conduct Regular Reviews
To make the process easier for everyone, follow a structured approach such as this:
- It’s impossible to analyze all sales conversations of all. Therefore, it’s best to analyze a set percentage of all interactions at regular intervals. This will provide you with an overview of how your team is doing.
- While reviewing the conversations, you will come across salespeople struggling to meet their goals. As you pinpoint the areas of improvement, offer them constructive feedback and coaching.
- Training the new sales agents is time-consuming. To bring them up to speed, start their review process during the onboarding to help them get accustomed to the quality standards.
Measure and Communicate Results
A quality assurance program is incomplete without analyzing and measuring progress. For this, you may have to pull out call center analytics and analyze the KPIs and compare the numbers to see what has improved. Nothing is more motivating for your staff than knowing their performance led to an increase in sales and made a customer happy.
Quality assurance is a staple for an ambitious sales team that is enthusiastic about improving sales performance. However, that starts with improving customer interactions by constantly monitoring and analyzing what is working and what is not.