Toward Better Sales Calls: 4 Metrics to Improve your Sales Conversations

There are many aspects to achieving a great sales call. But perhaps one of the easiest areas where you can increase your efficacy is by improving the way you speak. There are several objective criteria you can use to measure your speaking proficiency. SalesMagic uses 4 such metrics that are reported for every call you make.

Talk Time

There are several different opinions on what percentage of time you should talk on a sales call versus your prospect. Though a common theme is that the prospect should be talking the most, because this indicates that you're employing active listening to more deeply understand their priorities and concerns.

There's the often quoted 80:20 rule, where your prospect should be talking 80% of the time and you 20% of the time. While this gets across the general goal of having your prospect talk more, this is probably a more qualitative ratio. There are many 80:20 rules in life (known as the Pareto principle) so it's easy and appealing to apply it to our talk times too.

More quantitatively, a 2016 study analyzed 25k sales conversations and found that the most successful calls followed a 43:57 ratio, where the sales person would speak for 43% of the time and the prospect 57%. If you want to target this ratio, SalesMagic makes it easy to see how you're doing by showing your talk time for each call as a pie chart.

Speaking Pace

Your speaking pace is a measure of the number of words you speak per minute. Different types of conversations have different optimal speaking paces, but a pace in the range of 140 to 180 words per minute is a good target for sales conversations. If you're speaking much faster than this, it can be more difficult for the prospect to follow your message fully. If you're speaking below this range, it can be perceived as being unsure or unenthusiastic.

We have analyzed a large number of calls made within SalesMagic and found that on average sales professionals are speaking a little over 200 words per minute. This suggests that as a whole, sales professionals are speaking a little faster than may be optimal. Therefore one active task that you can undertake is to try to speak a little slower on your calls.

Sentence Length

Sentence length is simply the average number of words you use in a sentence. A good sentence length is between 6 and 20 words. Longer sentences tend to be more complex while shorter onces are easier to understand. Obviously, there are times when you want to prefer longer versus shorter based on the context, and indeed varying your sentence length can help keep your conversations engaging.

In analyzing calls made within SalesMagic, it turns out that sales professionals are doing quite well on this metric. We see an average sentence length of 8.4 words, which places well within the target range.

Clarity

The clarity index is a measure of how easy something is to understand. It is derived from your average sentence length and the percentage of complex words used (3 or more syllables). A good clarity index score is 30. Less than 20 may indicate language that's too simple; whereas more than 40 suggests that you're being too complex.

Analyzing calls made within SalesMagic, we see an average clarity index across our users of 17. This suggests that, on average, there is room for our sales professionals to get more technical and add slightly more complexity to their conversations.

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