You need to analyse a salesperson’s work across the whole deal: what the buyer asked, what the salesperson replied and how the conversation about buying ended. The first call is not enough. If the rest is in a personal messaging app, first piece together the business conversation; you cannot decide that an employee sells poorly from a fragment of the history.
We had a client — a language school. The first conversation with a prospective student went through the shared number and was recorded in CRM. Then the consultant arranged a meeting and continued the conversation in a personal messaging app. At a meeting with our head of sales and business development director, the school’s representative warned us: the initial calls were available, but the rest of the path to purchase was no longer fully visible.
“As soon as they arrange a meeting, they switch to a personal messaging app.”
That is where the record stopped. You can listen to the start of the sale, but to review what followed you have to go to the consultant. At the meeting, the suggestion was to review clients with each consultant separately as a temporary measure. We have no information on whether the gap in the record was later fixed.
What is missing from the records is the rest of the sale
Here it is easy to choose the wrong remedy: listen to more calls. The recordings are there, the work is clear, and the head of sales has something to show the business owner. But listening to more calls will only give you more information about the first conversation. It will not bring back the messages the parties exchanged after the meeting was arranged.
The gaps do not occur at random. A specific part disappears from view — the part reached by someone who is already interested. So the quality of the first contact and the quality of the work leading to a purchase cannot be assessed from the same set of recordings. A larger set does not remove this difference.
In this situation, the business owner risks paying to fix what they can see instead of what is getting in the way of the sale. You can spend a long time changing the greeting and the questions at the start of the conversation, even though you do not know what the buyer asked next or what answer they received. Money will be spent on training before the mistake that training should address has been found.
A positive conclusion is just as dangerous. Good first conversations are no basis for declaring that there is nothing wrong with the salesperson’s work. The unknown part of the deal remains unknown, whether or not we liked the fragment we could access.
What should accompany a conclusion about a salesperson
The business owner does not need to listen to every conversation. They need to understand the limits of the head of sales’ conclusion: which part has been reviewed and what material the decision is based on. Here is a quick guide to reading such a review.
| What the head of sales has | What can be concluded | What decision follows |
|---|---|---|
| The first call and confirmation that a meeting was arranged | It is clear how the conversation began | Correct specific mistakes in the first contact; review the rest separately |
| Business correspondence after the meeting is available, but stored separately from the deal record | The material has been saved; the full history still needs to be put together | Link the correspondence to the same deal |
| The rest is known only from the consultant’s account | There is an explanation from a participant, but no record of their conversation | Record the explanation and identify the missing source |
| The saved conversation contains an unanswered question, and the employee confirmed they sent no further reply | A specific missed action has been identified | Correct how this client is being handled and find out why no reply was sent |
The last row differs from the others because it provides a basis for intervening in the salesperson’s work. The absence of a message in CRM is not enough on its own: the reply may have been sent another way. Otherwise, a recording error becomes an accusation against the employee.
At the same time, there is no reason to wait until the whole history has been put together to address a confirmed mistake in the first call. If the salesperson gave incorrect information, it needs to be corrected straight away. The boundary is simple: we correct what we heard, but we do not declare this mistake the reason the purchase did not happen without reviewing the later conversations.
Will a head of sales who sits nearby help
There is sense in the objection to a remote head of sales: the business owner wants someone who knows what goes on in the department, rather than just receiving reports. But sitting at the next desk does not in itself open up the consultant’s personal messaging app. Access to the head of sales and access to sales conversations are separate working conditions.
Reviewing the details manually with each employee helps piece together the sequence of events for the time being. This was exactly the solution proposed to the school. Its limit is that it depends on the participant being present and explaining what happened. The head of sales spends the meeting collecting what is needed to start the review, then repeats the work for the next client.
The business owner’s decision here concerns the communication channel used for work. The company must decide where the consultant continues the conversation after arranging a meeting and how the business conversation history remains available to the head of sales. The choice of a particular service comes next. A requirement to “put everything in CRM”, without a convenient way to save correspondence, leaves the employee copying messages by hand.
There is no need to collect all their personal correspondence for this. What is needed is a separate way to communicate with clients for work and find those conversations by deal. For conversations already underway, there needs to be a procedure for transferring the business part: suddenly banning the messaging app will not, by itself, tell the buyer how to continue the conversation.
How to tell whether the gap has really been closed
You can see that it has been fixed with the first client who switches channels after the process has been set up: the start of the conversation, subsequent enquiries and replies are available under the same deal. The head of sales can reconstruct their sequence without the consultant’s account. If clients switch channels in different ways, this result is needed for every communication route used for work.
Automated review also has a place here. RENTROP’s AI ROP product for monitoring the sales team reviews the available calls and correspondence together with the deal record. If the rest of the conversation is only on a personal phone and the tool cannot access it, it will not be included in the analysis.
At that meeting, the school was given a temporary proposal: discuss clients with consultants one by one. This provided a way to get the missing information, but it did not mean that the shared record was already working. I am not prepared to draw a conclusion about the quality of the sale when the head of sales first has to ask the salesperson what conversation actually took place.