Part of a manager’s job is supporting their reports and helping them to improve through targeted feedback. However, the only real coaching that was happening was on sales calls that managers were able to attend.
Even when sales meetings were recorded, reviewing those recordings took time.
“Managers don’t have the time to sift through the whole recording to understand what the sentiment was for every call,” said Christine Hanks, a senior account executive. “I had to tell my manager how I thought the call went, but that was my personal opinion. As a salesperson, it can be difficult to distinguish between how I wanted the call to go versus how the customer actually felt.”
Conversation analytics transformed how we coach
Zoom Revenue Accelerator gave our sales teams much more than call recordings — it provided call summaries so managers could see at a glance what was discussed and the next steps that were being taken. It called out when a rep asked an engaging question or mentioned a Zoom product. It gave metrics on how quickly reps were talking and — importantly — how often they were using their time to listen.
“If you spend 80% of your time in a sales call talking versus asking really good questions and exploring deeper with the customer, you're going to be less effective. These are really easy metrics for managers to see at a glance on a report.”
Rob Greene, head of commercial acquisition sales
“It can be very eye-opening,” Christine said. “Having the feedback supported by analytics makes it easier to consume, and that just leads to faster and better training, opportunities for improvement — it takes the coaching aspect to a completely different level.”
Our enablement team also created playlists so our sales team and new hires could learn from their peers.
“There’s a difference between classroom training and real-life sales calls, where they’re handling objections and asking great closing questions,” Rob said. “It’s great to have that playlist capability to create libraries for every step of the sales cycle so we can say, ‘Here’s a great discovery call. Here are great calls for stage three, stage four, stage five, and so on.’”