How to improve your sales conversion rate with Tethr’s SalesRx

Carl Schultze

August 10, 2023

Every type of sales environment has its challenges–especially in a down economy when both consumers and businesses are more cautious with their spending. For contact centers with a high volume of transactions, some of the biggest challenges for sales reps may include having limited time with each potential buyer, facing a variety of objections, and consistently adhering to best practices across all calls. And for the leaders of these teams, one of the biggest challenges is determining where to focus their efforts to improve each rep’s performance and increase the overall sales conversion rate.

The sales conversations taking place within your contact center are, collectively, one of the most valuable tools your sales team has to improve its conversion rate. These conversations are filled with insights into the pain points buyers are experiencing and the techniques and offers that reps are having the most success with, and when you look at all of your conversations, patterns and trends emerge that allow you to make informed decisions to improve the sales process and buyer experience.

But if your sales team is placing or taking hundreds or thousands of calls each month, you can’t listen to every conversation. Fortunately, you don’t have to.

Tethr, our conversation intelligence platform, allows your team to analyze all their sales conversations and extract insights into common objections, the most successful rebuttals, individual and team performance, and more. This lets you make data-backed decisions–from educating agents about frequent objections to coaching the behaviors proven to drive more conversions.

We recently developed a set of SalesRx dashboards to give you a centralized view of the insights you need to improve your sales conversion rate. The dashboards are fully customizable but come with out-of-the-box reports to help you get started immediately: think of them as templates you can refine or expand on over time.

Below, we’ll walk through some of the out-of-the-box reports available in SalesRx–and how you can use them to grow your revenue.

Identify common objections and the most effective rebuttals

Almost 70% of sales calls contain some form of customer-stated objection, according to research shared in The Jolt Effect (co-authored by Tethr’s former Chief Research and Product Officer, Matt Dixon). Your sales reps need to be prepared to respond to these objections–or even better, anticipate and address them before the customer brings them up.

Successful objection handling has a significant impact on sales conversion rate. The study discussed in The Jolt Effect (and based on more than 2.5 million sales calls analyzed with Tethr) found a 31% win rate for closing calls with at least one rebuttal versus only 17% for closing calls with no rebuttal. Additionally, calls in which a sales rep offered a rebuttal to an anticipated objection had a 40% win rate (compared to the 26% average win rate in the study).

Tethr’s SalesRx breaks down objections by reason and displays them in a scatterplot so you can see which objections come up most or least frequently and which have the highest or lowest conversion rate. You can use this information to determine which objections you should spend more time coaching your team to address–and even help your team prepare to address the objections before the customer brings them up.

SalesRx also includes a rebuttals report showing which rebuttals your reps are using most or least frequently and which have the highest and lowest conversion rates. Rather than relying on anecdotal evidence from your top performers, you can get an objective view of what’s working best and coach your team to use the most effective rebuttals. You can also learn from your low-converting rebuttals–they may give your reps insight into what not to do or highlight opportunities to improve your sales process.

Track and evaluate how well sales reps own the conversation

A sales rep’s ability to own the conversation–e.g., establish themselves as a trusted guide, anticipate their buyer’s needs, verbally acknowledge what the buyer is saying–has a measurable impact on conversion rate.

For instance, The Jolt Effect study found that in won deals, sellers spoke 58% of the time (compared to 52% in lost deals). And while too little silence time (less than 8%) and too much (more than 30%) both contribute to lower conversion rates, silence time in the range of 8-17% drives win rates up over 30%.

We used the research from The Jolt Effect to develop a series of optimal range reports in the SalesRx dashboard. These reports track average sales rep talk time, active dialogue, call duration, and silence time. Sales leaders can use these reports to keep a pulse on how well their reps are owning the conversation at the team level, and if their team performance falls outside the optimal range, they can use this information to determine where to focus their coaching.

Uncover opportunities to coach behaviors that drive conversions

In addition to tracking sales rep performance at the team level, Tethr allows you to drill down to individual rep performance. You can input your team’s sales QA criteria to track sales rep behaviors that impact conversion rates–such as asking for the sale and handling objections–across every conversation. This lets you see where you should focus your coaching with individual reps and identify top performers that other reps can learn from.

Automated QA in Tethr also benefits sales reps by giving them objective feedback they can act on. Reps can see exactly where they need to improve based on data from 100% of their sales conversations rather than relying on manual spot-checks of a few calls that may not be representative of their overall performance.

Improve your sales conversion rate with SalesRx

Your customers and sales reps are giving you the information you need to improve your team’s conversion rate–it’s a matter of extracting those insights from your sales conversations. Tethr’s customizable SalesRx dashboards provide you with a centralized view your entire team–from reps to senior sales leaders–can use to uncover points of friction and opportunities for improvement.

If you’re interested in seeing how you can use Tethr to take a data-driven approach to improving your sales conversion rate, schedule a call with our team.