Orum - Learn from calls and ramp your reps faster with Orum's new Call Library

The sales development representative (SDR) role is notorious for having a short tenure. Whether SDRs move on to a role at another company or get promoted internally, they don’t spend much time in one place. The precise numbers related to tenure and turnover vary between industries, but a few numbers to consider:

These numbers don’t capture the turnover that is prompted by the company–layoffs, reorgs, terminations for performance reasons, etc. Naturally, these factor into the brief timeline for SDRs as well.

New SDRs also have a period of onboarding where they are being trained on the organization, the product, the market, and the tech stack that must be completed, reducing how long they are able to make a meaningful contribution. A 2022 report from The Bridge Group finds that ramping new SDRs to full productivity takes about 3 months. That same study also calculated an average “months of productivity” metric, finding that 59% of organizations only get 16 months of full productivity from each SDR.

With such a limited amount of productive time for SDRs, making sure that reps are onboarded effectively and receive high-quality, ongoing training and coaching is essential to maximizing the overall effectiveness of the sales development function.

One of the most challenging tactics for reps to master is cold calling. However, this is one of the most effective channels for connecting with prospects. The key to get reps up and running quickly on the phone is to provide frequent, actionable feedback on their calls.

That is why here at Orum we are excited about Call Library, our newest feature designed to help SDR managers provide more effective coaching and peer to peer learning opportunities for reps.

What is Call Library?

Call Library in Orum is more than just a list of all your recorded calls. It’s a curated library of content that showcases your team's very best calls. Here are some of the benefits that Call Library offers sales development teams:

Improve team performance by learning from past calls that showcase best practices
Ensure consistency in sales techniques by providing a centralized library of call recordings for reps to learn from
Increase productivity by allowing reps quick access call recordings and learn from successful calls
Facilitate better communication and collaboration among managers by tagging calls based on their content

Use Cases

Call Library is a versatile resource for sales development teams, especially when it comes to onboarding and coaching. Let’s take a look at some of the ways teams use Call Library in Orum to drive better results from their outbound calling programs.

Onboarding

Getting new reps trained on the phones quickly is critical for a successful SDR team. One of the best ways to learn how to be effective on the phone is to learn from peers. One way to do that would be by having new reps shadow the most successful reps, sitting in on their calls and seeing how they handle different situations. The problem with that route, though, is that your training program will be inconsistent and determined by whatever calls the senior rep has on a particular day.

A better approach is to curate exactly what new reps need to learn and build a library of calls that showcase each skill. By tagging calls and building playlists around key topics that should be part of onboarding training, managers know exactly what skills their reps will be learning and how long it should take them to review the recorded calls. This provides predictability and structure to your onboarding process, and you can more effectively evaluate if reps are learning the skills they need and identify areas to focus extra training.

Continuous Improvement and Coaching

Training shouldn’t end once formal onboarding is complete. The key to a highly effective SDR calling team is ongoing training and coaching.

Reps and managers can leverage Call Library in Orum to improve their coaching process by leveraging private playlists. When individual reps identify a call that they would like to receive coaching or feedback on, they can add it to a private playlists that is only visible to them. Then, when they have their one on one meetings with their manager they can bring out the playlist and go through any calls or portions of calls where they would like coaching.

Using private playlists to manage the coaching process provides a few key benefits. Reps can take more ownership of their own learning by identifying the calls they need coaching on. This means managers can spend more time on the higher-value work of coaching and less time looking through calls for all of their reps.

Additionally, reps can watch their improvement over time by building playlists based on topic. A rep that struggles with their opening pitch to engage a prospect can track their best and worst opening pitches to ensure they are improving over time, reviewing what worked and what didn’t as they refine their approach.

Objection Handling

One of the biggest areas that reps need consistent training on is objection handling. Common objections like not having enough budget, the prospect already having a solution in place, or trying to get off the phone by asking for the rep to send info can derail a valuable conversation before it even starts.

Being able to identify when a prospect raises an objection and having a response prepared can be the difference between setting a meeting and getting hung up on. This is one of the biggest areas that more experienced reps can help teach newer reps by example.

Orum makes it easy to find the best examples of handling specific objections by using our advanced AI to automatically detect when an objection is raised on a call and automatically tagging the call with the objection type.

Further, Orum highlights each instance of an objection in the transcript of the call, so it’s easy for reps and admins to find calls where objections are raised and then identify if the objection was handled well. By adding those calls where reps overcome objections and go on to have a valuable conversation other reps can improve their own handling of those objections when they encounter them.

Master Cold Calling with Call Library from Orum

Let’s face it–training reps to be successful on the phone can be hard. Cold calling is a true skill that takes ongoing practice and coaching to master. Combine that with the reality that SDRs have short tenures, it’s imperative to streamline onboarding and optimize your continuing education programs so reps can effectively harness the power of cold calling to set more meetings and open more pipeline.

Learn from calls and ramp your reps faster with Orum's new Call Library