Buying the Right System
5 min read
10 Questions to Ask Before You Buy Any Telecalling CRM
The end of this series is not a pitch. It is a diagnostic — ten questions about your own floor. Whatever you buy afterwards, and whoever you buy it from, answer these first.
Across nineteen chapters this series has made one argument in several forms: telecalling performance is not a mystery, it is a set of measurable behaviours, and most of what limits it is mechanical rather than motivational.
Here is that argument as a checklist. Answer these about your own business before you evaluate any product — including ours.
1. How many calls does each telecaller actually make in a day?
Not the target. The real number, from the last two weeks.
What the answer tells you: if it is well below target, the reflex is to ask for more effort. Before you do, count the manual steps around each call — the dialling, the retyping, the note-taking. In most teams the gap is mechanical, not motivational.
2. How long does the average connected call last?
What it tells you: under a minute, and your team is being rejected in the opening seconds — which is a training issue about the first fifteen seconds, not a data issue. Two callers with identical dial counts and very different durations are doing completely different jobs (Chapter 10).
3. Of the callbacks your customers asked for last week, how many happened on the promised day?
What it tells you: this is the most under-measured number in telecalling and usually the largest single leak. Every missed callback is a customer who had already agreed to talk to you. If you cannot answer at all, that is the finding.
4. Where are the numbers your team dialled last month?
What it tells you: if the answer involves personal phones, individual laptops or several unrelated spreadsheets, you do not own your database — your employees do. That is a commercial risk, not an admin detail (Chapter 13).
5. When a prospect returns a missed call, does your caller know who they are before answering?
What it tells you: if not, you are throwing away your warmest inbound moments several times a day. "May I know who's speaking" ends conversations that had already started well (Chapter 7).
6. How long does it take to produce yesterday's activity report?
What it tells you: if a person compiles it, you are paying for it twice — once in their time, once in the errors and optimism that creep into self-reported numbers. Reporting should be a by-product of the work, not a task on top of it.
7. Can you name the specific behaviour that makes your best caller better than your weakest?
What it tells you: "she's just good with people" means the difference is invisible to you, so it cannot be taught. Your top performer is currently an employee rather than a case study — and when they resign, their method leaves with them (Chapter 10).
8. On the 4th of the month, do you know whether the month is on track?
What it tells you: if you find out on the 31st, you are running autopsies rather than management. Everything that caused the number happened weeks before you saw it (Chapter 8).
9. How many actions does it take to get one new lead into your system?
What it tells you: count them honestly — copy, switch, paste, per field. Multiply by leads per week. That total is what you currently pay, every month, to move information between screens (Chapter 5).
10. If you removed every manual step from your callers' day, how many more conversations would they have?
What it tells you: this is the question all the others build to, and it is the one to put to any vendor. It has an arithmetic answer for your business, and any serious supplier should be able to work through it with you using your own numbers.
What to do with the answers
If you could answer eight or more of these confidently, you are running a well-instrumented sales floor and you should be extremely specific about what any new tool adds.
If you could answer three or four, you are in the same position as most businesses — and the good news is that the fixes are cheap and mechanical rather than cultural. You do not need a new team. You need the existing one to stop spending its day typing.
If you could not answer any, start there. Instrument first, then decide. Any change you make without a baseline is a change you will never be able to evaluate.
You cannot improve what you cannot measure. Most sales floors are not underperforming — they are unmeasured, and therefore uncoachable.
Where we stand
Calltica was built by people who spent fifteen to twenty years running sales and telecalling teams, including large floors in multinationals where thousands of callers worked US, UK and Australian shifts with fully automated dialling.
That background matters for one reason. When a software engineer builds a calling app, they build it from the technology outwards. When people who have actually run the floor build one, they build it from the caller's day inwards — which is why the design starts with the ten taps, the missed callback and the unrecognised inbound number rather than with an architecture diagram.
We do not sell technology. We sell what happens when the technology gets out of your team's way.
If the questions above produced uncomfortable answers, that is worth more than anything we could tell you about ourselves. Take them to your next management meeting first. Then, if you would like to see what the answers look like after a month of measuring properly, try it on one caller and find out.