Your sales team knows more than anyone what your customers want, what they need, and what they truly think of your product. If you’re not already sewing your sales team together with your product team, you might want to think about getting the needle and some thread.
The best way to get strategic insights from your sales team is by having them record their sales calls. This way, it can double up as UX research. By leveraging insights gained from these conversations, businesses can enhance their products and services to better meet the needs of their customers.
On the fence about the benefits of recording your calls to improve sales strategy? Here are 9 ways sales teams can influence product direction with call recordings.
9 Ways Sales Teams Can Influence Product Direction With Call Recordings
1. Identifying Customer Pain Points
In customer conversations, prospects and clients often express their pain points, challenges, and limitations they face with the existing product. Sales representatives can listen carefully to these concerns and document them in call recordings. By analyzing these pain points, product development teams can prioritize features and improvements that address real customer needs.
With a tool like tl;dv, it’s possible to convert your sales team’s talks with customers into UX research. Use the tl;dv library to easily search your growing collection of transcripts for keywords, and create reels in moments with tl;dv’s intuitive AI.
2. Uncovering Customer Needs and Desires
Just as your sales team can get to the nitty gritty details about your customers’ pain points, they can also better understand your users’ needs and desires. What do they really want from your product? And, more importantly, is your product currently giving it to them?
These insights are invaluable for product managers. Just imagine tapping into a pre-existing gold mine of UX research to align the product roadmap with customer expectations.
3. Feedback on Existing Features
Customers often provide feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of existing product features during sales calls. This feedback can highlight areas for improvement or potential areas of expansion. The good news is that prospects are usually more honest with sales teams, too. If they don’t want to make a purchase, they’re more likely to state why, whereas if they do make a purchase, they’ll often cite what it was that won them over. If they don’t explicitly state it, a good researcher will be able to spot it in their body language.
Analyzing call recordings allows product teams to refine and optimize existing features based on real user experiences. They can examine their users’ reactions both physically and verbally, using both the video recording and the transcript. If a sales team member spots talk of a feature that the product team will find useful mid-call, they can add a timestamp to the video call in real time! This means the relevant members of the product team will be emailed by tl;dv as soon as the call ends with a link to watch the exact moment that the feature gets mentioned.
This saves the product team having to watch the entire meeting, and it also saves the sales employee having to go back afterwards to quote the prospect or make a video clip. It can all be done in a simple click during the call itself!
4. Gathering Competitive Intelligence
During sales calls, prospects often let slip about competitors and their features: “Why should I use Threads when Twitter plans to take verified accounts into space?”
It’s times like this that communication with the product team comes in super handy. The more communication about what’s going on in these sales calls, the better. As mentioned earlier, timestamps and one-click reels are there to make the product team’s life easier. They don’t have to attend the meetings to get the good stuff delivered straight to their door (or inbox).
By creating a link between sales and product teams, you can share information about your competitors. This information helps businesses stay informed about the competitive landscape and adjust their product strategy accordingly to maintain a competitive edge.
5. Validating Product Ideas
Sales teams can use call recordings to test new product ideas or prototypes with potential customers. There is often a demo slide during a successful presentation of the solution to the prospect’s problem, which opens up a great way to play with various product ideas.
By presenting these ideas during the sales process, the salesperson can gauge customer interest and receive direct feedback. This feedback can guide product development decisions and validate whether the proposed changes align with customer needs.
6. Understanding the Customer Journey
Analyzing call recordings allows businesses to gain a deeper understanding of the customer journey. Sales representatives can learn about the specific challenges customers face at different stages of the buying process. This understanding can lead to product enhancements that better support customers throughout their journey.
Source: Dribbble
Adding extra utility to your sales calls is essentially getting UX research for free. You’re already running the sales call. You’re already paying the salesperson. You’ve already got the prospect’s attention. All you’re doing now is recording it, and using the recording for multiple different reasons. Basically, you’re a genius.
7. Improving Sales Pitches
By reviewing call recordings, sales managers can identify successful sales techniques and messaging that resonate well with customers. They can then train the sales team based on these insights to increase conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
And training new employees has never been easier with tl;dv and your ever-growing wealth of stored meetings. Just turn them into a highlight reel with a few little clicks and you’ve got yourself a fantastic onboarding video that gets them immediately in the right frame of mind. This doesn’t just go for new employees either. The whole team can benefit from continuous learning through regular reviews of sales pitches.
8. Building Stronger Customer Relationships
When sales representatives actively listen to customers during calls, it fosters trust and rapport. Understanding customer needs and providing personalized solutions can lead to stronger customer relationships, higher retention rates, and valuable word-of-mouth referrals.
There are a number of techniques to improve your listening skills, but the best – by far – has to be the ability to rewatch your pitches to see how you responded to your prospect. How did you incorporate what they said? How well did you comprehend their concerns or opinions? Did you really think about their objections, or did you butt in with an immediate plug to your product? Having sales reps rewatch their pitches is a surefire way to improve their future customer relationships.
9. Tracking Product Impact on Customer Success
After product updates or new feature releases, sales teams can track the impact on customer success metrics through call recordings. They can keep tabs on the shift in customer sentiment and document it all in their very own UX research repository. Essentially, they’ll monitor customer reactions, collect feedback, and report back to the product team, facilitating iterative improvements and updates.
This is another great connection that can be forged between the product team and the sales team through the magic of call recordings. Create as many of these connections as is feasibly possible and you’ll blast through your target metrics for the year. It’s the key to fantastic product evolution.
Start Recording Today
tl;dv offers all the call recording goodness you could ever need and makes it super easy for you to get started. You barely need to lift a finger. Signing up is free and you’ll immediately get access to unlimited call recordings, transcripts, and the ability to translate in almost 30 languages. Plus, you’ll have AI notes and summaries as well as all the features we already mentioned.
If you’re ready to take things a step further with your business, tl;dv’s Pro plan empowers you to integrate with Salesforce, Hubspot and all your other favorite work apps. Download tl;dv for Google Meet or Zoom and get started today.
