A wholesale reseller of industrial equipment. Fifteen sales reps, around a hundred calls a day, a long deal cycle, an average order value in the hundreds of thousands of rubles.
The owner spent five to ten hours a week listening to calls. Formally, that was quality control. In practice, it was a sample: he could only get through a small share of the flow, and it was usually the calls that had already gone fine anyway. The surface complaint sounded like "conversion isn't growing, even though we have enough leads." The real problem ran deeper: he couldn't explain in numbers why one rep closed noticeably better than another on the exact same traffic.
He rejected the idea at first. "A machine won't understand our specifics — these are technical negotiations about tolerances and delivery windows, not selling vacuum cleaners." He agreed to a pilot on one condition: the system would first score a hundred calls he'd already scored himself by hand, and they'd compare results. The scores matched almost everywhere. We now offer that same test to every skeptic — it's honest, and it costs one evening.
We set up scoring for 100% of calls against a checklist built from his own script: did the rep uncover the customer's need, did they quote real delivery windows, did they handle "too expensive," did they set a next step with a date. Every call got a score and a short summary with quotes. Failures on critical checklist points were flagged the same day, not buried in a monthly report.
The first week revealed something nobody expected: a significant share of calls ended with no next step set — reps were simply saying "I'll send it over." The fix wasn't training, it was daily visibility. Over two months, conversion rose 27%. The owner's personal review time dropped from ten hours a week to thirty minutes — he opens a summary now, not recordings. Along the way it became clear what set their strongest rep apart: he always got to the customer's actual need, and he always closed the call with a date. Those turned out not to be personality traits but two checklist items now built into the script for everyone.
"I thought I knew my sales team. Turns out I knew the part of it I had time to listen to — and that was the best part."
A real case; the company's name is withheld under NDA. Your numbers will depend on current conversion, deal cycle, and script quality.
