Ways to measure efficiency and sales call performance of a sales rep

Sales reps make numerous amounts of sales calls during their day. But have you ever wondered how many of them are actually effective? 

The adage, “more calls equal to more leads,” no longer stands true. In fact, this is one of the most common myths sales reps are persuaded to believe.  

Salespeople spend one-third of their day just talking to their prospects. This reflects how essential sales calls are for the company. Moreover, it becomes even more crucial to track the sales call performance. 

I’ve listed down ways to measure and track your sales call performance, so you can improve your productivity and crush your sales quotas. 

Measure sales call performance and achieve your sales goals 

In order to accurately measure your sales call performance, you need to constantly optimize your strategy and implement methods that work for your sales reps. Below methods of measuring sales call performance will help you set clear goals and track sales calls.

1. Find out how the sales rep handles and qualifies leads 

In sales, every lead should be nurtured equally and qualified according to their response. Therefore, it’s imperative to identify the process of lead qualification done by your sales reps. 

• Are the sales reps considering the prospect’s interests?  
• Has every prospect been followed up with? 
• How many follow-ups are your sales reps doing before categorizing them as not interested? 

The above factors play a vital role in qualifying leads, so you need to know that your sales reps are following the lead qualification checklist.  

Did you know that 60% of customers say no four times before saying yes, while 48% of salespeople don’t even make a single follow-up attempt? Based on this data, more and more sales reps need to start following up more than once if they want to score more leads.

2. Determine average sales per sales rep and per team 

When we talk about measuring the sales call performance, it basically comes down to numbers.  

This calculation measures the efficiency of sales calls made by the sales rep or the sales team. This indicates how many deals your sales rep or team closed compared to the number of sales calls they made. 

If the conversion rate is average or high, it means that your sales team and reps are performing well. But, if they’re making, say, 50 calls a day but not closing any deals, it shows that the sales calls are not that effective and action needs to be taken. 

You can find the issue and provide training to sales reps that are underperforming, so it doesn’t affect your company’s revenue in the long run.

3. What’s the average handling time? 

Yes, the quality of sales calls matters more than the number of sales calls made per day. However, do you know how much time the sales rep is spending on one sales call? 

To measure the average handling time, you need to divide the length of all calls made by the total number of calls. 

Generally, low average handling time indicates low-quality sales calls as you could not keep the prospect engaged.  

At the same time, a very high average handling time also indicates that something is not working out between your sales rep and the prospects. Therefore, you need to consider your industry and target audience when setting a benchmark for average handling time.

4. What is the average hold time for sales calls? 

Often, sales reps aren’t able to reach the prospects as they didn’t attend the call or it went to voicemail. In such a scenario, interested prospects might call you back. 

The average hold time represents how long the customer has to wait before a sales rep picks up the call. Ideally, the average hold time should be kept low if you want to convert more prospects into customers. 

Having a low average hold time also reduces call abandonment as the customers don’t have to wait too long. This way, you can improve the efficiency of sales calls and keep your customers happy at the same time.

5. How much time is after-call work taking up? 

A sales call doesn’t end with just one conversation; there are minor tasks and paperwork to be done in between each call.  

After the sales call ends, a sales rep needs to fill in the required information in their CRM or manually log in the summary and key points of the sales call.  

Usually, sales reps hurry to move from one call to another, so it’s necessary to check how efficiently the after-call work is done. You can lose a prospect if any information is miswritten in between the calls. 

Therefore, find out how much time sales reps are taking to perform these tasks in between their calls and check if the information entered is correct or not.

6. Examine the quality of sales calls 

In the end, it’s the quality of sales calls that will get you more leads; hence it’s one of the most important factors you need to keep an eye on. 

You can only convert your prospects into customers when you’ve resolved all their queries, and they’re satisfied with the value proposition.  

Now, it’s not possible to check the quality of every sales calls made. However, you can randomly pick a few calls and go through the call recording to determine how the sales rep is conversing with their prospects.  

You can share your feedback with the sales reps and convey which method works best during a sales call.

7. Closing the first sales call 

One of the best ways to improve sales call performance is motivation. Whenever employees are appreciated for their work, they’d be encouraged to perform better, hence becoming more efficient and bringing more sales.

Similarly, if you want your sales reps to continue closing more deals, you can determine how many first sales calls ended up in sales. Usually, it takes 6 calls to make a sale. So, when the sales rep closes a deal on the first sales call, ensure that you recognize their efforts and reward them. 

This activity will also motivate other sales reps to perform better. 

Conclusion 

Making sales calls is a hectic task, and it ends up taking the majority of your day, so you need to ensure that your efforts are delivering results. 

When you have measured the sales call performance of your sales reps and sales team, you can pick the right strategy that works best for your company and its target audience. 

Moreover, the above-listed ways for measuring sales calls can also help your sales team optimize the sales strategy, resulting in the company’s overall growth.