Talking Beats Typing

Here’s a stone-cold truth: reporting has to happen for you to manage your sales teams.

Reporting can happen at meetings, you could ask for emails, or your company might have a CRM. Each of these comes with their pros and cons, and it’s your job as the sales manager to make sure your team has the right tools to optimize the reporting process. 

Let’s take a look at what each brings to the table:

• Meetings – These get everyone together but usually lead to broad stroke reporting. No one’s got a fresh perspective on their customer calls, and it’s hard to break down individual details when you’re getting multiple reports from everyone at once.

• Emails – These are written records you can reference back to at any time, but it’s easy to lose details in a stack of emails. A cluttered inbox is not an easy place to identify trends.

• CRMs – This gives you recording and organization options, but it also relies on your sales team to put in the details accurately. Asking them to type out a report after every call (or even at the end of every day) demands a lot of time out of their day… or does it?

We’ve worked through the numbers and the results are in: sales reps who talk through their notes convey information faster than those who type up the details—which in turn allows for more time selling.

Combine the speed of talking with a virtual assistant and those notes turn into a platform that helps your whole team. It helps your sales reps by keeping things in order, automatically handling scheduling appointments, creating reminders and follow-up tasks—and it helps you by generating reports and ensuring you have the insights you need at every step.

Talking vs. Typing By The Numbers 

Most people type between 30-50 words per minute if they get in a groove. In contrast, when talking people average 150 WPM. Talking is simply 3-5x faster than typing.

Not only that, but requiring reps to type instead of talk also demands they shift brain activities after every sales call. According to Johns Hopkins research, the acts of speaking and writing are supported by different parts of the brain.

So when you ask your sales team to open a laptop or put their thumbs to work on their phone, you’re inadvertently throwing up a roadblock between them and their next objective. This sort of distraction and time sink is one of the main reasons sales reps hate CRMs.

When your sales reps don’t have to worry about switching gears or waste time typing, it’s a lot easier for them to take notes right away before moving on to the next sales call—which makes them much more likely to actually do it. This leads to a couple benefits:

• It’s done right away, so you get the management and logistics information you need ASAP.
• Your sales rep is fresh off the call and has everything they need to be accurate and clear in their notes.
• There’s no chance of your sales rep forgetting the most important details that stick out in their mind post-call.

“Our team has been able to spend more time in the field, making more sales calls, and as a result—making more sales. We are huge fans of Voze.” – Alan Guidish, President Preferred Sales

Our Experience

After performing more than 9,000,000 “virtual assists” as our clients’ Virtual Assistant CRM we’ve learned something: Empowering a rep to update their CRM by voice (instead of typing) delivers more detailed reports and more actionable data than any data-entry CRM and… it only takes a rep, on average, 47 seconds.

So keep your team talking—not typing. If you’d like to see how VOZE could speed up your processes while driving better results, request a demo today.