Partner Article

Is poor memory costing your sales representatives their target?

It’s widely known that sales is a numbers game. More calls generate more sales. But what if small lapses in memory are slowing down your sales team or even worse, resulting in missed opportunities?

Think about it, how many numbers can you hold in your head? Seven, eight, maybe nine? Everyone’s different but most of us can hold between five and ten different things in our head at any one time. That’s really not an impressive number when you start to put it in the context of a busy working day. How much is lost to the ether forever from one phone call?

Survey time!

We tested London professionals to see how much they could remember from a one-minute phone call. The recording, a call between a recruitment consultant and a prospective candidate, contained numerous personal details. The survey participants all listened to the recording on their mobile to highlight the challenges of remembering information ‘on the go’ as sales professionals typically spend the highest proportion of their working day away from their desks, without a notepad and pen, or computer, available to write down the information discussed.

As you can see in this video, not a single person could remember everything and most of those interviewed could only recall small bits and pieces. Perhaps most worryingly of all is the brain’s ability to generate false memories. Many of those we spoke to thought they remembered the correct information but were just plain wrong.

Our memories are fickle, so what?

Well think of all those industries that rely heavily on telephone interaction, such as a banker making trades in the financial services or a recruiter getting vital details from a prospect.

Forgotten or misremembered details can have a significant effect on a business – it could be a lost lead or an unhappy customer. There are those immediate impacts and, of course, obvious issues around regulations.

Imagine how much time could be saved if call notes were automatically populated into your centralised CRM system after every single call? This saves hours of call admin for the sales rep and dramatically improves your data quality.

Natterbox integrates mobile and landline call activity and recordings directly into CRM systems such as Salesforce.com for companies including Groupon. Our clients generate 60-80% productivity improvements with time saved on call admin while Sales Managers finally have visibility of their team’s telephone activity – the earliest part of the sales funnel.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Neil Hammerton .