Voice of Sales (VOSales) is a crucial component of Customer Experience (CX) programmes. It is essential to capture and analyse this data in conjunction with other Voice of Customer (VoC) data. Without it, you risk overlooking a significant source of valuable information.
Sales teams are ideally positioned to provide this feedback. They engage in ongoing dialogues with prospects, existing customers, and lapsed customers. They have the opportunity to hear about the challenges that organisations face, understand their objectives and goals, and even gather information about competitors. It's important to remember that your sales team may have better opportunities to communicate with individuals who never respond to surveys or other types of research. This makes VOSales a strategically important part of the programme.
However, data collection may not always be structured or organised. To address this, ensure there is a system in place for uploading notes from meetings. Ideally, you should have a customer relationship management (CRM) system, and all notes should be added alongside the respondent’s profile. The same applies to emails where products, challenges, and KPIs may be discussed.
Once you have the data, ensure it is analysed and included in the overall reporting. If you have a business intelligence (BI) or CXM platform that provides text analytics, ensure this information is analysed in conjunction with the rest of the feedback. However, ensure you can filter it out and compare the differences between survey and non-survey responses. If possible, create customer profiles (based on organisation or account) where you can quickly identify the most important areas for satisfaction or dissatisfaction, as well as key pain points and ways to overcome them.
Lastly, ensure this analysis is shared with the sales teams. You can equip them with actionable intelligence before strategic meetings, provide them with bulletproof facts when renegotiating contracts, and most importantly, keep them engaged and part of the process.
1. NPS/CSAT data – at least 300 unique cases, customers, accounts that goes back at least 1-2 years depending on survey frequency
2. Additional Data points – at least 10 CRM/operational variables and 2 time-specific behavioural variables (e.g. help call, cases, issue, usage, etc.)