What can marketing learn from sales call recordings?

Sales call recordings are an excellent tool for coaching reps. Not only are they beneficial for the sales department – marketing teams can gain plenty of insights from listening to these valuable real-life interactions. In fact, our sales team regularly shares calls with us (thanks Sam and Anna!) for all of the following reasons:

Listening to real sales conversations can:

Create Better (or even new) Personas

There’s been an increasing reliance on persona development, particularly in the B2B space. It not only helps in understanding prospects, but it keeps companies accountable to remain as customer-centric as possible. Personas are usually developed from a survey of the business landscape that targets decision makers and influencers to outline their core responsibilities or pain points in an organization. But this approach is insular and lacks external insights that could help continue to validate or build out new personas. Enter: sales call recordings. Listening to actual sales conversations not only helps marketing teams understand how well their buyer personas align with actual customers, but they provide added insights about the people behind the personas. This intel is like that collected in interviews during persona development and allows marketing to keep personas relevant. There is an incredibly strong correlation between persona effectiveness and external persona research. Research indicates that 89% of effective personas were based on new external research.  Meanwhile, 86% of ineffective persona did not include new external research. Ultimately, listening to calls can be the source of new external persona research.

Clarify Prospect Needs and Concerns

Call recordings helps marketing teams understand the ever-changing needs and concerns of prospects to adjust messaging accordingly. This information provides insights about content needs for blog posts, ebooks, podcasts, and more. Plus these conversations  reveal potential new sales enablement materials that should be produced to help sales better address the needs of their prospects or their ability to speak intelligently with them. An added bonus is that this information may also reveal new opportunities for product add-ons that address new needs as well.

Strengthen Sales Enablement

Reviewing call recordings allows marketing teams to hear customer objections so content may be written to address them. This could be in the form of various marketing content or  training and sales enablement materials to help reps respond more effectively to objections. These recordings also reveal topics of interest at various stages of the buyer’s journey. This helps marketing create better content for sales to use at each stage and facilitates the development of related internal educational materials as well.

Refine Product Messaging and Positioning

If prospects are expressing confusion about marketing messages during calls, it may be a cue that there’s too much jargon being used or that the wrong prospects are being targeted. It’s important to remember to speak to prospects using the language they use. What better way to speak to the customer than using their own words?

Improve Lead Quality

If marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are being invalidated by sales, call recordings can help marketing teams understand what’s happening. Taking a look at metrics to see what other variables are potentially affecting lead quality. Are “hot” MQLs being responded to in a timely manner? Are there enough follow ups happening? Does sales understand the types of leads that are being handed off and how to “speak” to them, regardless of method (email, phone, etc.)?

Impact SEO and SEM

Listening to recordings of introductory calls reveals the search terms prospects use when looking for your product. They show you what questions customers are asking, how they’re asking, what their needs are, and what keeps them up at night. This helps you understand the terms you need to use to improve your SEO and SEM. Validating key words and phrases also leads to relevant content ideas that align with the different stages of the buyer’s journey.

Identify case study candidates

Case studies are an excellent marketing tool. They’re great top-of-funnel content, but also help sales teams substantiate their conversations during the buyer’s journey. Listening to call recordings helps identify actual success story candidates .  They also reveal the types of companies, industries, size, challenges, and more, to help marketing teams determine future case study development needs.

Valuable information is contained in sales call recordings. These conversations are a natural resource and the basis of all companies.

Comment below and let me know if your marketing team is utilizing sales call recordings!