Investing in an AI-powered Live Conversation Platform is the first step to supercharging your sales team’s outbound efforts. Increasing your dials alone isn’t what takes your team to the next level. Understanding how your outbound calling program is working and what areas can be improved is the key to making the most of your investment. Here are the top four metrics you should be tracking in your Live Conversation Platform.

Bridged:Connect

Bridged:Connect is an important metric that helps you understand how well your dialer and reps work together. As a rule of thumb, you want your Bridged:Connect rate to be at least 50%. If the rate is lower, it could indicate a few different things:

• Your dialer could be returning false positives by incorrectly identifying an answering machine as a human.
• Your reps could be hanging up on prospects, indicating a need for more training.
• Your reps are incorrectly dispositioning their calls. For example, a rep may disposition a call as “busy,” which should indicate that the phone line was busy when, in reality, the prospect said they were too busy to speak. Incorrect dispositions can distort the Bridged:Connect metric.
• Your reps may not be speaking to the right person. Just because a live person picks up doesn’t mean you have made a connect. It’s important that connects are only noted when the target persona picks up and not, for example, a receptionist.

Account Performance

Understanding how target accounts perform in your outbound calling program is critical to understanding where your reps should spend their time. Here are a few key metrics that can help you understand account performance:

• The number of prospects on the account tells you how deep your reps have penetrated the account. Multi-threading and developing relationships with multiple contacts is a strong strategy for creating momentum and opening an opportunity.
• Number of dials. This tells you how actively your reps are working each account. For example, an account with a high number of prospects but a low number of dials would indicate that reps should be spending more time working on that account.
• Connect to conversation rate. This metric tells you how much traction your reps gain with each account. A high connect-to-conversation rate tells you that when reps can connect with prospects, they can frequently have conversations, which builds relationships and allows reps to book meetings.

Overcoming Objections

It is critical to overcome objections when trying to book a meeting with a prospect. As an SDR manager and coach, you need to understand where your reps are having the biggest challenges in dealing with objections.

First, understanding what objections your team encounters most often is critical to determining where to focus your training efforts.

Next, look at how often the rep can book the meeting after encountering the objection for each objection type. Even if an objection arises frequently, if reps are doing well overcoming it, you may not need to spend as much time coaching around that objection type.

Finally, look at the rate at which each rep can set a meeting after encountering an objection. This allows for targeted coaching based on individual rep needs.

Orum provides a heatmap to identify the objections individual reps struggle with the most.

Best Time of Day to Call

The million-dollar question when outbound calling is when. Calling at the right time is critical for connecting and booking a meeting. In the past, SDRs had to rely on “rules of thumb” or “best practices” when planning their calling blocks. Surveys and studies have been done to identify the best times of day to call, but how do you know if that data applies to your prospects?

The best way to know when to call your prospects is by looking at their data. Orum looks at all your team's calls and identifies what times of day have the highest connect rates.

Of course, that is only the first half of the equation. Once you know what time to call, are your reps dialing at the right time? Orum tracks when your reps are dialing and allows you to compare that against the times when prospects are most likely to pick up. This allows you to coach your reps to ensure that they are maximizing their dialing time.

Leveraging the right metrics can significantly enhance the performance of your SDR team. Focusing on key metrics ensures your team works efficiently and effectively and helps you drive better results, build stronger relationships with prospects, and ultimately achieve greater success in your outbound calling efforts.