“Would you hire this rep?” A new measure of sales rep performance

After a recent call to the customer service department of a major airline, I was presented with a single simple automated yes/no question: “If you ran a customer service department, would you hire the rep who just helped you?” My answer was a resounding yes, but it presented an interesting question.

From the inside of a sales organization, we can capture and monitor every aspect of rep performance. Sales tools provide the ability to measure factors from basic sales activity numbers like calls placed, emails sent, or messages left, to advanced metrics like callbacks, lead response time, and the dials-to-win ratio. With a simple glance at a dashboard, a sales manager can instantly see their team’s health and have the information they need to improve it.

However, the ultimate test of a sales rep is not in the numbers they can meet, but in the experience that they provide. We’ve talked about it before… there is a seismic shift happening in sales. No longer is sales just about generating numbers, its about providing value and solving problems for clients.

Regardless of if they sign a contract, if customers do not find your product or service to be valuable or useful, they will not be your client for long. This means that sales reps need to ensure that they not only provide value to prospects during the sales process but that the buyer will actually benefit from your solution in the long term.

Ultimately, you want your sales reps to provide such a good sales experience that the prospect will try to steal them away. But in both a logistical and experiential sense, you cannot ask every prospect if they would hire the sales rep they just spoke to. So the question is, how can you measure the sales experience that your reps provide from an external perspective?

Post-Sale Surveys

A post sale survey is your after-action report, supplied by the new client. This report gives you valuable insight into what the purchase experience was like and is the perfect opportunity to ask about an individual rep’s performance.

When you create your survey, it’s important you keep it short, the fewer questions you have, the better the chance you have of getting thoughtful, complete answers. Think about what you really need to know in order to improve the buying experience.

Examples to consider are:

• Why they chose to buy from you
• Their opinion of your sales experience, and how they would improve it
• The decision criteria they used to make a decision
• What was done right about the buying process

Within the post-sales survey, include questions about the rep themselves. You could even be as direct as to ask if the buyer would hire the rep they worked with.

Conversation Analytics

If post-sale surveys aren’t an option, or you would just like more detail without extra effort, sales teams can now utilize conversation analytics in order to surface extra insights from sales conversations. conversationAI* can analyze phone conversations, then analyze them using an AI to provide specific metrics around conversational performance.

Sales teams can then utilize this data in order to see inside sales conversations and infer the quality of conversations from the metrics. Sales managers get reports that cover the talk ratio, amount of overtalk and interruptions, talk streaks, and more.

*conversationAI US Patent 10,440,181.