Sales teams function successfully when individual sales reps follow the optimal contact strategy. Many sales reps use automation software and sales dialers to help guide their sequence of activities, but these tools often fail to deliver deeper insights that managers can use to improve the underlying contact strategy.
How can one tell what the best contact strategy is? For many teams, it is a combination of a sales team’s “secret sauce” and industry best practices. By combining a mixture of different communication channels, including phone, voicemail, email, social touches, and SMS text messaging, sales reps can increase the likelihood of success with tier contact strategy.
Here is a sample best practice contact strategy:
With Limited Data Insights a Sales Strategy May Fail
While sales teams can use the contact strategy example above as a solid starting point, organizations need to create their own contact strategy by using deeper insights to maximize their effectiveness.
Unfortunately, most sales teams fail when it comes to insights. While data around talk time or number of voicemails is readily available, the connection of those activities to progress in the sales cycle is lacking.
To make things worse, some solutions don’t provide sales leaders with the opportunity to tweak their sales workflow or contact strategy. Instead, black-box solutions are all too common, setting the contact strategy based on rigid predictive algorithms or leaving the sequence to the reps discretion. Without consistency, sales leaders have a limited view of what is working and what isn’t.
Using Disposition Data to Drive the Optimal Contact Strategy
One of Velocify’s defining principals is its ability to track and analyze disposition data. It is important to note that when referring to disposition data, we’re referring to two key pieces of data (1) sales stage (how far the opportunity has progressed in the sales cycle) and (2) call disposition (what sales activity has been logged by the sales rep).
• Examples of sales stages include – marketing qualified opportunity, sales qualified opportunity, closed won, closed lost.
• Examples of call dispositions include – called left voicemail, bad number, demo booked, demo conducted, demo cancelled.
It is important to track this way for several reasons. As we pointed out earlier, it is vital to record disposition data as you refine and optimize your ideal contact strategy. Disposition data can be used to better understand the effectiveness of your contact strategy in many ways. Here are a few to get you started:
• Identify activities that progress deals – When a record of milestones is maintained, such as “scheduled demo” for example, a sales manager can determine which activity was most likely to convince a prospect to schedule a demo. Was it the second follow-up call or a customized email sent after the prospect visited the website?
• Identify any setbacks or lulls – To get a better idea of where deals are getting stuck, it’s important to analyze the duration of time between sales stages. By drilling down on data, managers can see which activities were and weren’t logged to help trouble shoot how to improve their contact strategy.
• Identify sales reps who are under performing – Any outliers who are not as effective as their peers can be identified through analyzing the outcomes of customer interactions by a sales rep. This data can also be used for coaching.
A process that includes tracking and analyzing disposition data is ultimately empowering managers to isolate the most important dynamics and measure the effect of even the smallest adjustments to a sales contact strategy.
Would you be interested in a product demo to better understand the power of data disposition and how your sales organization can benefit? Get a demo today.
