Sales Notes: Why You Need to Take Notes?

Sales notes are important sales documents that every sales professional must take and keep close at all times. Unfortunately, many sales reps hate taking notes. Understandably, it would be much more stressful and time-consuming if you had written notes for every sale call you make. Imagine writing notes when you have to make over 70 sales calls in a day.

Hectic right? We understand how tedious this task can be, not forgetting all the other functions you will still be required to do in a day. But that doesn’t invalidate the importance or significance of sales notes to increase your chances of closing more deals. Remember that the hallmark of every successful sale is the sales rep’s ability to get all the essential information about their clients and leverage it to pitch the products or service solutions to them.

By taking notes, you understand your clients more and allow them to build better working relationships. In this blog, we have explained what sales notes mean, why you need them, and what you should take note of in your notes.

Table of Contents

• What is a Sales Note?
• Why Do You Need Sales Notes?
• 8 Ways Salespeople Can Interact With Prospects Using Sales Notes
• Important Details To Include in Your Sales Notes
• A Step–by–Step Guide to Creating Sales Notes

What is a Sales Note?

Sales notes are an essential business document that sales reps use to keep track of key points and decisions. It helps you capture vital information and specific details about your client during sales calls. You must ensure your notes or details are clear, concise, and organized.

Sales notes are essential because they can help you close deals. In addition, a clear record of the client’s needs and wants enables you to understand better their needs to tailor your services to their needs or situation.

Why Do You Need Sales Notes?

Sales notes can help you in the following ways:

1. It helps you capture relevant information

At the most basic level, sales notes help you capture relevant information about your clients to help you determine how best your services match or fit your customer’s needs.

If you make several sales calls a day, it would be almost impossible to remember everything your prospect says during a 60-minute phone call. This is more of the reasons why you need to take sales notes.

2. It increases the sales team’s success

Sales notes are not only essential for you too. Taking detailed, comprehensive sales notes will help your entire sales team access valuable, accurate information that can support collaboration and help you all close deals more efficiently.

3. They are a great quality control measure

Taking sales notes gives sales managers more insight into the sales process and pipeline to determine which tactics are working and which need to be discarded to prevent any sales team member from making costly mistakes that could affect sales performance.

4. It showcases your professionalism

Taking sales notes during a sales call can show your client how experienced and professional you are. As a sales rep, closing deals go beyond just pitching the product or service in the best way possible to look the part.

You are trying to convince them to invest their money in your product, so you must show them they can trust you.

5. It makes the client/customer feel important

As stated above, taking notes is a sign that you are professional. Beyond this, it also shows your prospect that you actively listen to what they say.

Like you, a bartender or server takes down your order to prevent mixups; note-taking shows that you take the time and due diligence to record their words accurately.

6. It helps you create a better sales pitch

A sales pitch is a structured sales presentation that a sales professional develops to persuade clients with a planned presentation strategy. Presenting a great sales pitch deck without your comprehensive sales notes would be almost impossible.

The more detailed the sales note is, the more professional and convincing your sales deck is. But, importantly, it also helps you speak directly to the needs and pain points of the prospects.

7. It gives room for additional ideas or questions

Making proper sales notes allows you to analyze the sales information after the sales call to open your eyes to new points, connections, or areas you missed. This way, you can prepare better for next time, and it helps you make more successful sales calls.

8 Ways Salespeople Can Interact With Prospects Using Sales Notes

Here are the eight practical ways that you can interact with your prospective clients using sales notes:

1. To improve your business offerings

Taking Sales call notes lets you capture important client information during the sales call – from personal information to contact details, current priorities, goals, interests, and other important information.

With this note, you can review all those crucial details to identify areas where your products or services could improve in a way that meets the needs and requirements of the client.

2. To help you create marketing collaterals to support sales

Taking proper call notes gives you a better overview of your prospective client and current situation and determines how your product or service can come in.

Once you identify how your product or service comes into the picture, you can use this to create marketing collaterals such as eBooks, white papers, infographics, case studies, and reports to support your sales calls. Remember that case studies and testimonials are practical marketing tools to help you build trust and credibility with potential customers.

3. Identify patterns in your sales data to tailor your strategy

When you consistently take sales notes, you can identify market trends or patterns that have significantly impacted your sales in the past years.

For example, you could notice that you made more sales when offering demo requests to your clients than when you didn’t. With this information, you can include it in your current strategy and tailor it to meet your clients’ needs to boost sales.

4. To enhance sales forecasting

Sales forecasting is estimating future sales or revenue by predicting the number of products or services a sales team would sell. Strong sales notes help you track important sales data that you can use to identify patterns and trends to predict future sales better. In addition, sales notes can be beneficial when launching a new product or entering a new market.

5. To Track the Sales Pipeline

Taking complete call notes allows you to track your progress with your potential customers and get a better overview of the prospects not moving forward and those further along. Importantly, sales notes also help you identify any potential roadblock early enough to develop an effective solution to the problem.

6. To create training materials for new sales reps

Sales notes provide you with all the necessary information to better understand prospects and the sales process. You gain a more precise overview of what works and what doesn’t in your sales process. All this information can come in handy when onboarding new sales reps, who can learn from your mistakes and take note of the success tips.

Consider including your opening pitch, objections and objection handling strategy, closing techniques, and other important information for better understanding. Compiling and organizing all this vital information can serve as a guide for new salespeople. Remember to include examples and explanations.

7. To track the customer churn rate

Just as tracking your sales success rates is essential, monitoring your customer’s churn rate is equally important. The churn rate or attrition rate refers to the rate at which customers stop doing business with a company over a given period.

To track churn rate with sales notes, you can look out for the complaints that were most raised by clients and look for the patterns of when and how customers leave your product. For example, did they close their account with you or stop doing business with you, and what complaints did they raise before leaving? With this, you can determine the cause and quickly act if any customer raises such concerns.

8. To Improve customer satisfaction

Sales notes help you keep track of your customer’s complaints, concerns, and dissatisfaction with you, other reps, or your product or service. When you understand what the problem is, you can tackle it to improve your service and increase customer satisfaction.

Important Details To Include in Your Sales Notes

Here are the five most important details that you must include in your sales notes to increase your efficiency and sales success:

1. Details about your client’s

Information is power. You can tailor your product or service to your client’s needs and create better pitch decks with the correct information.

For this reason, you must ensure that your sales note captures your client’s personal information, contact details, company, and other information significant for sales.

2. Specific sales information

Now that you have their complete personal details, and company information, the following important information to include in your sales note is the business/sales information.

This information will include their goals, current priorities, interests, pain points, and projects for that they need your service. Then, you can develop a sales strategy that meets those needs by understanding what they want, their budget, and their plans.

3. Actionable Plans and Follow up tasks

So you have all the necessary information needed to kickstart the sales process. You must also list and define all the tasks you must carry out to sell to the client and close the deal.

Aside from the tasks, you must also include the complete list of strategies, discounts, offers, or incentives that you can give them to increase sales revenue.

4. Identify where your solution fits

Present your product as a solution to the prospect’s business problem to stimulate their interest in your business offering.

You must write down their key concerns and business challenges and list ways your product or service can solve those needs. Also include all the benefits, offers, and incentives that your business gives to convince them further.

5. Do a Post-call analysis

A post-call analysis helps you analyze the sales calls to determine how good it is and the possibilities of closing the deals. Remember, sales are not complete until you have successfully closed the deal.

Even after that, there is still always room for improvement. Hence you can conduct a post-call analysis to determine if there’s something wrong or lacking in your sales calls.

A Step–by–Step Guide to Creating Sales Notes

Below is a step-by-step guide to creating good sales notes for sales professionals.

1. Create a plan

The key to every successful endeavor is effective planning. If you don’t plan well, you are most likely to fail. Hence, planning is the first step to ensuring your sales teams create great call notes. Identify, list, and define all the information and steps you need to take during sales calls.

2. Personalize your sales notes

Personalization is significant to sales success. Hence, it would be best to personalize your questions and conversation with every client to build rapport and successful work relationships.

3. Don’t write everything word for word

If you do this, there’s a high tendency that you will be reading the content of the note when speaking with your clients. To not sound unprofessional or robotic, only write the key points that can guide your sales conversations.

4. Keep your notes consistent

Don’t write out of context or omit some important details as the sales pipeline expands. Ensure the information you ask for in your first call is the same as in subsequent calls.

5. Take note of all action items

Always take note of action items, follow-ups, and timelines in your sales notes. This includes customer follow-ups, tasks, and internal to-do.

6. Consider using CRM Software

Finally, instead of pen and paper, consider using CRM software to create better sales notes to make the process more efficient and straightforward.

Conclusion

Sales notes are essential to sales success. It can help you take note of all critical sales information, client information, and other relevant information that can help you understand the client better and tailor your services to best suit their needs.