Do you know how often the sales reps in your call center use rebuttals when they get an objection? It’s probably less than you think.
“Even though the data makes it very obvious that conversion rates are significantly higher (often 50% or more) when your reps respond to an objection with a rebuttal, they're not always doing that,” says Don Davey, Senior Director of Customer Success at Creovai. “Reps may avoid rebuttals because it leads to a longer call length, and they know it’s bad for them if they miss their sales goal AND controllable KPIs like average handle time. Or, if it looks like they’re going to hit their sales goal, they don’t want to exceed it by too much, or the goal could increase.”
In most call centers, consistent rebuttal usage isn’t tracked or rewarded. "Reps aren't held accountable for using rebuttals, so they focus on other controllable KPIs,” says Davey.
Even if your sales reps are using approved rebuttals, you might not know which of those rebuttals are most successful (or how your top-performing reps are tweaking them). And that means you’re missing out on opportunities to replicate best practices, deliver a consistently high-quality customer experience, and increase sales.
Your sales call recordings contain all the data you need to determine how often your sales reps are using rebuttals (and which rebuttals are most successful with different objections). It’s just a matter of analyzing that data, surfacing the insights, and putting those insights to work.
Tracking rebuttals with conversation intelligence
The first step to improving rebuttal usage is to track this behavior across all sales calls—not just the 1-2% that you manually QA. You can do this using conversation intelligence: a type of software that uses AI and machine learning to transcribe calls and analyze them for specific phrases, events, and behaviors.
Conversation intelligence can help you answer these questions about your sales calls:
- Did the customer make an objection?
- Did the sales rep give a rebuttal to that objection?
- Was the rebuttal successful (i.e., was there a sale)?
You can set up reporting to compare the conversion rate for sales calls with objections and rebuttals versus no rebuttals. You’ll likely see a stark difference. The Jolt Effect, a study that analyzed over 2.5 million sales calls using Creovai Conversation Intelligence (formerly Tethr), found a 31% win rate for sales calls with at least one rebuttal compared to a 17% win rate for sales calls without.
You can also categorize different objections (e.g., price sensitivity, lower competitor quote) and the different rebuttals your sales reps use for them. From there, you can look at the frequency and success rate for each rebuttal.
This will help you quickly understand what’s working well, what’s less effective, and which rebuttals you should coach reps to use more often.
Once you’ve identified your best rebuttals, you can drill further and look at a sampling of individual calls containing those rebuttals. Pay attention to the specific language your top-performing reps use—there's a good chance they’re deviating from the standard scripts based on what they know works well. You can build the specific messaging of your top performers into your coaching and real-time guidance, helping all your reps close more sales.
Coaching for rebuttal success
Because conversation intelligence lets you track the rebuttal usage and performance of your sales reps on 100% of their calls, it’s a powerful addition to your call center coaching strategy. You can use conversation intelligence reporting in your one-on-one coaching sessions to highlight the rebuttals your reps are doing well with and the ones they’re struggling with (or not using). Play example call recordings to help illustrate what’s going well and what reps need to work on. You can also conduct role-playing sessions based on actual call recordings to help reps increase their confidence with rebuttals.
Giving your sales reps data-backed coaching on rebuttals is a good starting place, but you should make rebuttal usage one of your reps’ KPIs to further incentivize this behavior. Don Davey also recommends adjusting your reps’ average handle time goal to allow for longer calls. “If your conversion rates go up significantly with the use of rebuttals, your reps won’t need to make as many calls,” he says. “I would also recommend that instead of making your reps’ quotas higher, you make the use of rebuttals a multiplier to their bonus payouts. The carrot is better than the stick if you do it right.”
Scaling your coaching with AI agent assistance
Coaching sessions and KPI-based incentives should encourage your reps to use rebuttals more, but you can set up your reps for even greater success with real-time coaching prompts.
“We train our agents and hope they use the right rebuttal, but they’ve been trained on multiple rebuttals, and maybe they’re more comfortable with an old one, so they stick to it,” says Steve Trier, Chief Customer Officer at Creovai. “But when you know the best rebuttals, you can feed them to agents in real time.”
Real-time agent assist software uses AI to detect what’s happening in live conversations based on what the customer and rep are saying. You can train the software to recognize when a customer or prospective buyer makes specific objections, then trigger an on-screen prompt with a suggested rebuttal.
This increases the likelihood that reps will consistently use the best rebuttal for every objection. It helps them feel more confident, enables your contact center to deliver a consistent buying experience, and increases conversion rates.
Measuring the impact
If you’re making any changes to the way your contact center approaches rebuttal usage—whether it’s coaching reps on this behavior, incentivizing it, building it into your real-time guidance, or all of the above—you'll want to measure the impact. The specific metrics you track will depend on your goals, but key areas to look at include:
- Rebuttal usage
- Conversion rate increase
- Sales rep attrition/retention
Rebuttal usage rate
This is an easy one to start with, and you can use conversation intelligence to track this metric. You'll be answering the question, “How much has rebuttal usage increased in sales calls with objections?” Measure the rebuttal rate when you kick off your rebuttal-improvement initiative, then measure it again at regular intervals (e.g., weekly, monthly). This will let you track improvement and help you determine if you need to take additional steps to increase rebuttal usage.
Conversion uplift for calls with rebuttals
The next order of business is determining how much your conversion rate has increased since you started your initiative to increase rebuttal usage. (This is another metric you can track using conversation intelligence software.)
If you know your average deal value, you can calculate the ROI from your conversion uplift. Let’s say, for example, that your business has a subscription model and the average deal value is $100 annually (to keep the math simple). If your sales reps’ increased use of rebuttals led to 500 more subscription sales in one month, that’s $50,000 in increased revenue.
Sales rep attrition
While helping your sales reps improve their rebuttal usage probably isn’t the only thing influencing their decision to stay with your contact center, you shouldn’t discount it as a contributing factor.
When you give your sales reps the tools to close more deals, they’ll be incentivized to stay with your contact center for longer—meaning you’ll have more experienced reps on your team, fewer operational disruptions, and better sales call outcomes.
Look for any change in your annual attrition rate after implementing your rebuttal-focused initiative. You can calculate the ROI based on the average cost of replacing a sales rep. For example, if you estimate it costs $30,000 to replace a rep and your reduction in attrition means you’re keeping 10 more reps annually, that’s $300,000 in annual cost savings.
Final takeaways
Rebuttal usage has a huge impact on conversion rates—but as a sales team leader, you can’t just assume your reps will automatically use the right rebuttal when presented with an objection. Your reps might not know what rebuttal to use, or they might not be motivated to use one due to competing KPIs, such as average handle time. It’s important to investigate what’s preventing your reps from using rebuttals and address the issue through additional coaching, a restructuring of your KPIs, and/or on-screen real-time guidance.
As you rethink the ways you enable and incentivize rebuttal usage, keep your conversation data front and center. Use conversation intelligence to track rebuttal usage, identify what individual reps need to be coached on, surface your top-performing rebuttals, and build those top rebuttals into your real-time guidance platform. Enabling your reps with data-backed coaching and recommended rebuttals during their sales calls will set them up to close more deals, leading to increased revenue, a better agent experience, and a better buyer experience.
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