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Today’s contact center sales teams face more challenges than ever before. The average team is siloed from their marketing counterparts. They use totally different metrics and methods to measure performance and, as a result, have trouble gaining alignment. And since today’s customer journey is fragmented across many online and offline channels, these misaligned sales and marketing teams struggle to create a cohesive buyer experience.
In addition, contact center sales teams face bandwidth issues — many managers oversee large teams and don’t have enough time to QA a large enough sample size of their agents’ calls. This can make it hard for them to train agents and help them grow their skill sets. Agents, meanwhile, are burdened with tedious after-call work that eats up their time.
To solve these challenges, leading sales teams use revenue execution platforms. Revenue execution platforms are software solutions that connect the entire customer buying journey. They work by bridging the data gap between the marketing team that engages customers and the sales teams that close the deals, creating a cohesive view of the revenue journey.
Keep reading to learn how revenue execution platforms help sales teams align with marketing, improve buyer experiences, enhance agent coaching, and much more.
Marketing and sales team friction is a tale as old as time. Despite sharing the common goal of driving revenue and acquiring customers, they often find themselves at odds. In fact, in our recent State of B2C Revenue Execution Report, we found that while 9 in 10 businesses believe marketing and sales alignment is important for driving revenue growth, only 1 in 10 say their teams are strongly aligned.
Oftentimes, the marketing team insists the sales team is fumbling the hot leads it sends over, while the sales team insists those leads weren’t so hot to begin with. These disagreements can easily arise without a shared dataset that the teams can align on.
Revenue execution platforms solve this all-too-common issue by connecting the entire revenue journey, from the ad or webpage the customer clicked to the call they placed to the result of that call. This gives marketing and sales teams a shared view of which marketing sources are driving high-value phone leads and how well the sales team is closing those leads. Rather than pointing fingers, the teams can use this data to partner more effectively. They can double down on the programs driving high-value phone leads and correct any issues that are harming call conversion rates, such as low staffing or ineffective scripts.
This collaborative approach eliminates inefficiencies in the buying journey and improves close rates.
Today’s customers have higher experience expectations than ever before. According to research, 76% of consumers will stop doing business with a brand after a single bad experience. Customers don’t just expect a good experience when they’re on your website — they expect a seamless experience throughout the entire journey. However, our State of B2C Revenue Execution Report found that many companies can’t optimize the full buyer journey because they lack visibility into offline interactions like phone calls.
One of the most frustrating disconnects between the online and offline experience is when callers are routed to the wrong agent or go through multiple transfers in which they have to repeat themselves. These inefficiencies in the call routing process annoy customers and make them less likely to convert.
Revenue execution platforms solve this issue with intelligent call routing. Intelligent call routing uses data from the caller's digital journey before the call to automatically send callers to the sales agent best equipped to handle their inquiries. Intelligent call routing not only connects the online-to-offline experience — it also reduces hold times and improves close rates, since agents have more time to focus on high-value leads.
Once the call is connected to the right agent, revenue execution platforms can give them the data they need to personalize the conversation — more on this in the next section!
According to our research, 47% of consumers expect a high level of personalization when they call a business. They expect you to know who they are and what they want without having to tell you again, and again, and again. However, many sales teams don’t have the right level of customer data they need to deliver personalized experiences.
Rather than greeting the caller by name and diving right into the conversation, they have to ask the caller who they are and why they’re calling. This frustrates callers and lengthens conversations, which results in longer hold times.
Revenue execution platforms solve this data gap and give you the granular customer data you need to provide seamless caller experiences. Solutions like Invoca PreSense give contact center agents insights about the caller’s digital journey before the call begins so they can serve them better. Just imagine the difference between hearing “Hello, thank you for calling, before we get started can I have your name?” and “Hi James, I see you’re looking for high-speed internet. I’ll happily help you find a package that fits your needs.”
This level of personalization can eliminate lengthy exchanges that irritate customers, waste valuable agent time, and drive up costs. It can also be the difference between a sale and a one-star review.
Quality assurance is critical for coaching sales agents as it ensures they comply with your scripts and best practices for customer conversations. By conducting regular evaluations, sales managers can identify strengths and areas for improvement, providing targeted feedback and coaching to help agents grow their skills. In addition, it can help you ensure your agents comply with all applicable regulatory standards in your industry.
However, many sales managers don’t have the bandwidth to score enough of their agents’ calls — especially if they oversee a large team. In fact, according to our research, 62% of contact center managers said they can’t score enough calls to accurately measure agent performance.
To solve this issue, leading contact center care teams use revenue execution platforms to automate call quality assurance. No two sales organizations are the same — that’s why Invoca allows you to set your unique criteria to score sales agent success. For example, you may want your sales agents to start with a greeting script, mention an upcoming promotion, and then ask the caller to schedule an appointment. The call scorecard uses AI to automatically detect which criteria are met on each call and assign a corresponding score. Invoca also allows you to track caller and agent sentiment, get alerts when call handling issues occur, and quickly dive into specific call recordings and transcripts for review.
With automated quality assurance, you can ensure that every phone conversation at every location lives up to your brand’s standards. Your agents will also receive instant and objective feedback about how well they’re performing. This will allow them to quickly make pivots to better serve and delight your consumers. As a result, you’ll build brand loyalty and close more sales.
On top of answering customer calls, your contact center agents have to complete tedious after-call administrative work like summarizing conversations and updating the CRM. After-call work eats up time your agents could spend on higher-value activities. These administrative tasks can also increase hold times at your contact centers or locations, as agents need to complete them before they can take the next call in the queue.
The right revenue execution platform can help you remove unnecessary administrative work from your agents’ workflows so they can focus on assisting customers. Some platforms automatically send call outcome data, such as what a customer purchased, purchase amount, and more, to a CRM in real time, eliminating the need for agents to manually enter the information. Revenue execution platforms can also use generative AI to automatically summarize calls so agents don’t have to do this work themselves.
Want to learn more about how revenue execution platforms can help you overcome your sales challenges? Check out these resources:
