A New, Higher Bar for Compliance: Mitigating Risk and Enforcing Consistency

Compliance is a necessity of any sales organization—it’s one part risk mitigation and one part consistency. But most don’t even know if they are following the rules, let alone following their team’s processes. It’s no surprise, considering how much of sales is done digitally now, that information is more at risk than ever, and not structuring process leads to unpredictable performance. 

Customers should feel safe interacting with your reps and know that their information is secure. Managers shouldn’t have to worry about reps accidentally breaking compliance rules or unintentionally going rogue. Building a culture of security for your customers and consistency for your team starts with compliance. 

So, how do you ensure your team is following the rules and winning at the compliance game? In sales, it’s aligning communications and infrastructure to regulatory standards and guiding reps with guardrails that can be measured and enforced. Failing to cover either facet of compliance can result in both legal action and missed targets. Not to mention, it’s a turn-off to current and potential customers. 

One Forbes article suggests building a culture of compliance with:

  • A management culture that encourages compliance.
  • An organizational chain that allows access to the CEO or board.
  • An established, formal program for internal compliance.
  • Sufficient resources dedicated to the program.
  • Tools and training to enable employees to comply.
  • Systems and protocols for monitoring, identifying, and correcting possible violations. 

Building this culture of compliance is much easier and more effective with a platform built from the ground up to ensure your success in these areas. That’s where Playbooks comes in. 

What You Should Consider Tackling 

Driving a winning and compliant sales team means following the legalities of compliance as well as providing reps with a proven structure for their workflow. In Playbooks, you can set customized compliance restrictions based on location (global, regional, etc), time (date, day of the week, etc), or other activity (repeated dialing, outbound calls, etc). Playbooks in the only sales engagement platform with this level of compliance and this kind of solution. Use Playbooks to meet your compliance needs and run a highly functional, effective, and compliant sales team. 

Compliance applies to several areas of sales—mainly call compliance, email compliance, data compliance, Play compliance (if you’re a Playbooks user), CRM compliance, and general compliance. Below, we’ll dive into each of these sections—including some legal requirements and other team-specific workflow requirements, and what Playbooks can do to enable it.

Call Compliance 

This one is a doozy. Sales reps spend A LOT of time on the phone. One study found that 92% of customer interactions happen over the phone. With that kind of investment of time spent on the phone, it’s important to get it right. Some call compliance areas to consider including:

  • Call recording and monitoring restrictions— Some regions may have restrictions on if (or what portion of) a call can be recorded or monitored live. 
  • Local regulations call restrictions— There may be local restrictions for when reps can call. For example, in the state of Utah, you cannot cold call on July 24th. Why? Because it’s Pioneer Day, a state holiday.  
  • “Do Not Call” restrictions— Contacts that are on a “Do Not Call” list cannot be cold-called. There are several “Do Not Call” lists to keep track of and reps may not know if their contact is on one of those lists. 

These are just a few things to look out for in your cold-calling compliance. Sales engagement tools, like Playbooks can be a safeguard to ensure your team is up to date and following these rules. Playbooks can be used to:

  • Create rules based on area code restrictions (only applicable within the US). Set these rules to avoid monitoring, recording, or cold calling when it’s not legal. 
  • Get alerts for the numbers you are dialing based on the area they live in (coming in May 2021). For example, if you are calling a number in Texas and the state is currently in a “state of emergency”, reps will be notified and can redirect accordingly. 
  • Dynamically pause call recordings. Pause a call recording at any time, like when you’re taking down credit card information, to avoid recording illegally. 
  • Set up your platform to alert
  • Automatically block numbers that are on national “Do Not Call” lists. 
  • Avoid over-dialing and over-calling. Alert reps when a record has been contacted that day. Managers and admins can also run reports to see how many calls reps are making to each contact. 
  • Customize fields on your call log. Add custom and dependant fields to keep track of metrics that matter.

Email Compliance 

In this digital era of sales, salespeople spend 21% of their day writing emails and send an average of 36.2 emails per day. Having fool-proof (and fully legal) email methodology is vital to a rep’s success. Examples of email compliance include:

  • Email opt-out— Sender must allow an opt-out option and comply with opt-out requests.
  • Email blacklisting— Emails may be marked as “private” and cannot be added to your CRM.
  • Email send limits— Inboxes may have limits, and when they’ve reached that limit, emails will no longer reach them. 

Here’s how Playbooks helps you follow email compliance, produce reliable results, and create the best email experience for your prospects:

  • Block emails from being sent to those who have opted out. And include an embedded email opt-out link that will automatically update your CRM, to make things simple. 
  • Detect invalid email addresses. Prevent spam scores from increasing by avoiding sending emails to invalid addresses. 
  • Create custom email templates. Admins can create and lock certain email templates for reps to use. Reps can also customize email templates within the bounds set by administrators. 

Data Compliance

The new landscape of sales relies on data to get the job done. That said, sales orgs must comply with relevant data, privacy, and security laws. Playbooks has several features that help you comply with these laws and keep your data secure, including:

  • Encrypt data in transit and at rest.
  • Anonymize data in use.
  • Control which features are available to individuals and groups.

Workflow Compliance

A consistent and reliable workflow means consistent results. Ensure reps are following the workflow most likely to set them up for success with these features:

  • Workflow adherence reporting— Review levels of activity complete on steps in a workflow.
  • Custom sorts— Make sure reps focus on the best records first, resulting in higher compliance and higher conversation rates. 
  • Playbooks PriorityMode— Managers can create a custom order for reps to work records and reps are unable to break from that order.
  • Skip reporting— Reps can choose to skip a task within a Play, but they are required to explain why. Data is saved to the CRM.
  • Play Adherence Reporting— Administrators and managers can run reports from the CRM to see how many activities are being completed inside of a Play or outside of a Play. 

CRM Compliance

CRM is the main source of knowledge for many salespeople—it is no longer an optional tool. In 2020, CRM ranked as the most attained tech tool for sales teams. But having CRM is not enough, how you use it will make all the difference. Here’s how Playbooks builds on and augments your CRM:

  • CRM merge field limits— Through Playbooks PriorityMode admins can ensure that reps work records in the order in which managers define. 
  • Access user data access— Customers have complete control over what fields are shared with Playbooks platform. Only fields that are shared can be accessed by Playbooks.
  • CRM sync logs— Detailed logs (including activity data like calls, emails, etc.) are available for customers to review the activities that have been synced to the CRM. 
  • Customizable sync controls— Admins can determine how Playbooks syncs activities back to the CRM. Common configurations are to sync as the user or the access user.
  • API limit toggles— Set the maximum number of API calls that Playbooks can use over a 24-hour period. 

For a full compliance and security checklist click here

Creating a Mindset of Security and ConsistencyThough there are several boxes to check when it comes to compliance, going beyond the checklist and encouraging a mindset of compliance will help your team connect with buyers in a more significant and effective way. As stated previously, compliance is about building a culture of security and consistency. Consider how you would like your information dealt with by a company. Establishing a sales system that not only complies with legalities but also ensures customer’s peace of mind and helps reps succeed through consistent and reliable cadences is all possible with Playbooks. Demo it today to find out how. 

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