Improving telesales performance: why call monitoring isn’t as effective as call coaching
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Tue, Sep 08, 2009 @ 01:13 AM
Today's post is for managers, but you telesales reps will want to read this, too, because it affects a lot of you directly. It's about a practice common in the inside sales business that is widespread, and not as effective as a lot of managers think it is. It's called call monitoring.
Monitoring is the practice in which inside sales managers, from their own desks, listen to taped or real-time inside sales calls from their reps. In this practice, managers take notes on the call and then later review the call with the rep at some future time. So what's wrong with that? Since the rep cannot immediately achieve success by correcting call issues immediately, effective learning-by-doing doesn't occur. Discussing the call even one hour later isn't very good, because the rep has gone onto other calls, and may not remember what thought processes triggered his or her actions on the call. And "gotcha" moments aren't very much fun for the reps, either.
There is a better way to ensure rep success, and it's called side-by-side coaching. It's done at the rep's desk, in real time. It provides an opportunity for immediate success and enhances team communication, initially between the rep and the manager, and later, through sharing of best practices, throughout the entire inside team as well. In addition, coaching is way more permissible, legally, than monitoring, according to some guidelines cobbled together by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
I've long been an advocate of coaching inside sales reps as a more effective alternative to monitoring calls. Let's face it, all reps want to improve their inside sales skills, to accelerate the sales cycle and make more money. That's a real motivator. They want their managers to partner with them to achieve success, but monitoring is often perceived as micro-managing, because it's done from afar, and doesn't allow for the rep to give immediate feedback. As a manager, it's critically important for you to allow the rep to gain a "win" immediately after feedback, and the best way to do it is to coach your reps while they're in the process of making actual calls. That doesn't mean handing them scraps of paper telling them what to say during a call, either. During the call, a good coach sits back, listens, and takes good notes. After the call, you can debrief. And if the rep missed something vital on the call, he or she can call the prospect right back, while you're sitting there, and fix it. After that second call, the rep will have demonstrably shown improvement, and both of you walk away with a win. Not only that, the rep will, in all probability, welcome your presence and opinions at future coaching dates.
How effective is side-by-side coaching? Here's a statistic that's pretty telling: over 130 inside sales reps that have taken my telesales courses have become sales managers or execs, and they did so by learning to think like managers, while they were reps. And many of them tell us that those coaching sessions we conducted served as the template they use today when coaching their own reps. Yes, we do teach managers how to coach in our coaching classes for managers, but for those of you that haven't taken our classes, in next week's post, I'll give you 6 great tips on what you can do to either jump start or improve your own coaching techniques right now.
To sum up: Improving rep performance is an educative process, and giving your reps instant wins is critical to behavioral change. If you're currently monitoring instead of coaching, please reconsider coaching as a faster and more effective way to improve the performance of your inside sales and lead qualification reps. Add side-by-side coaching to your Best Practices playbook.