sales-call-review

Call Review

Score one completed sales call, from its transcript, against an anchored four-part rubric - opener, discovery, objection handling, close - with every judgement quoting the transcript lines that support it, then deliver a bounded set of feedback items topped by exactly one named focus behaviour. This skill evaluates what the rep did on this call and stops there:

• Never writes the rep's next script.
• Never plans their quarter.
• Never scores the deal.
• Never drafts the follow-up email.

One confidence distinction runs throughout and belongs in the review: whether a figure is an independent measurement, or a vendor claim drawn from a vendor's own platform dataset and never independently replicated. No vendor correlation here is causal, ever.

Interview

Ask before reviewing. One question per message; offer multiple-choice answers when possible; skip anything the transcript or the user's message already answers.

• Who is reviewing? (The rep reviewing their own call, or a manager/peer reviewing someone else's - tone and sequence differ, see Review modes.)
• What kind of call? (Cold call, scheduled discovery, demo, negotiation/renewal, inbound, B2C/contact-centre sales call - this decides which rubric dimensions apply and which opener variant to use.)
• B2B deal call, or B2C / inside-sales / high-volume consumer call? (B2C adds an optional compliance and script-adherence dimension.)
• Paste or attach the transcript. What shape is it - speaker-labeled? timestamped? complete, or partial?
• What was the call's outcome? (Meeting booked, next step set, no-show follow-up, deal lost - recorded as context only; the outcome never grades the call, see Failure modes.)
• Was a focus behaviour named in a previous review of this rep? (The first check of this review is whether it changed.)
• Does the team run a sales methodology or a house scorecard? (The review uses its vocabulary and any custom weights where they exist.)
• By when must the change show up on a live call? (Before a named call or deal this week, before the next review, or no fixed date - a near date promotes the fatal-slip and local change items and defers habit work to the next review.)
• Do you want this call fixed, or this rep's habit fixed? (One-off: the focus behaviour targets a local moment tied to the live deal. Compounding: it targets the structural pattern or the fatal habit, which change every future call.)
• How much coaching time exists before the next reviewed call? (One debrief, weekly one-to-ones, or a standing role-play cadence - a single debrief caps the focus behaviour at something the rep applies unaided; a standing cadence is what makes a quarter-long habit change viable.)

Workflow

1. Run the Interview; obtain the transcript before forming any opinion.
2. Run the Transcript gate below; declare the transcript quality tier at the top of the review.
3. Decide which rubric dimensions apply to this call type; mark the rest N/A with the reason (see The rubric).
4. In manager/peer mode: elicit the rep's self-assessment before revealing any score - "play the tape and let the rep self-assess first before opening feedback" (Armand Farrokh's 3-Step Tape Review Method, 30MPC).
5. Walk the transcript once, segmenting it into opener / discovery / objection / close passages; collect candidate verbatim quotes per dimension along the way.
6. Score each applicable dimension against the anchored descriptors in references/rubric-anchors.md. Apply the Evidence rule: no quote, no score.
7. Attach a confidence tier to each dimension score (rules below).
8. Identify any fatal moment - a single passage that would kill the deal or breach compliance regardless of how the rest scored. It is reported above the scores, never averaged away.
9. Select the bounded feedback set: at most 2 strengths (each quoted), at most 3 change items, exactly 1 named focus behaviour - ranked per Bounded feedback, then re-ranked against the Interview answers.
10. Assemble the review per references/review-template.md; run the Quality gate; iterate until every check passes.
11. Deliver, ending on a strength - close the session with the rep "Positive. Better. Empowered." (Kevin Dorsey via 30MPC).
12. If your harness has persistent memory, memorize the rubric weights used, any agreed N/A conventions, and the single named focus behaviour - the next review starts by checking whether that behaviour changed. This is measurement continuity only; building a development plan from the trend belongs to a coaching skill, not here. Without memory, hand the user the review file to keep and re-supply.

Transcript gate

Run before any scoring. A review built on a bad transcript is confidently wrong.

• Quality check. Read the transcript for ASR damage: garbled or nonsense words, non-speech tokens, heavy repeated filler, long unexplained gaps. If roughly a fifth or more of the content is damaged, refuse to score - report the damage and ask for a cleaner transcript or the recording's key passages instead (threshold adapted from published transcription-pipeline practice).
• Speaker labels. If labels are missing or generic, infer speakers from in-transcript cues: introductions, names used in address, who asks vs. answers. When a name resolves late in the transcript, relabel all earlier turns. If two speakers genuinely cannot be told apart on a passage, do not attribute it - flag it and ask the user; never guess silently (diarization-disambiguation practice from published transcript-handling workflows).
• Citations. Quote with a [HH:MM:SS → HH:MM:SS] range when timestamps exist; fall back to line numbers, then to the verbatim quote alone. Every citation must let the user find the passage.
• Long transcripts. Segment by call phase and review sequentially. Never deliver a review from a partially read transcript without saying exactly which part went unread.
• Partial transcripts. Score only the dimensions whose call phase is actually present; mark the rest "N/A - phase not in transcript". Absence of data is never a zero.
• The one-line rule. Never score a dimension confidently from a single garbled or ambiguous line. Cap that dimension at Low confidence and state what a cleaner transcript would resolve.

Confidence tiers per dimension (this skill's rubric): High - two or more clean, mutually consistent passages; Medium - one clean passage, or several partially damaged ones agreeing; Low - a single ambiguous or damaged passage; flag, do not conclude.

The rubric

Four dimensions. Anchored behavioural descriptors for each - what a 0, 2, and 4 actually sound like on tape, plus per-dimension evidence cues - live in references/rubric-anchors.md; load that file to score.

Dimension	What it measures	Named sources	N/A when	Default weight
Opener	Cold call: earning explicit opt-in and an environment where real conversation can happen. Scheduled call: agenda set with Purpose, Plan, Outcome	Jason Bay's Cold Calling Framework (via 30MPC); PPO (Armand Farrokh)	Inbound call the prospect initiated with no opening move to judge	20%
Discovery	Problem-first questioning that ladders from symptom to consequence and tests whether the problem is worth solving - not an interrogation	SPIN questioning heritage (Rackham's 35,000-call study); anti-interrogation warnings (Jen Allen-Knuth via 30MPC)	Demo/negotiation call where discovery was explicitly completed on a prior call	30%
Objection handling	Objection restated, addressed, and resolution confirmed aloud - not argued over or capitulated to	Mr. Miyagi Method: agree → disarm → redirect (Armand Farrokh); listen → restate → resolve → confirm (Salesman.com framework)	No objection surfaced - note whether prevention or disengagement explains it ("the best objection is the one you don't get", Chris Beall via Sales Gravy), then N/A	20%
Close	Next-step commitment: continued-investment check, timeline pressure-tested, rep proposes concrete steps - on real deals only	The 5 Minute Drill (Armand Farrokh)	Call cut off before any close was possible	30%

Scoring rules:

• Scale 0-4 per dimension; behavioural anchors written at 0, 2, and 4 only - interpolate 1 and 3. Anchoring a few points concretely beats vaguely labeling every integer (see Reliability).
• "Close" means the next-step close, not the contract signature - so it applies to nearly every call type, including discovery calls. Only a cut-off call makes it N/A.
• N/A dimensions leave the denominator entirely; renormalize any aggregate to the applicable maximum. Never score a structurally absent dimension 0 - a low number implies a coachable failure, and there was nothing to fail at.
• Weight ordering, stated: discovery == close > opener == objection handling. Discovery ties with close, and opener ties with objection handling: the sourced teardown material spends comparable attention on each pair member, and nothing measured separates them. Treat the ordering as this skill's weighting, not an outcome ranking - it follows where the teardown material puts its attention, not a measured effect on win rate.
• The weights stop at two tiers rather than four because splitting discovery from close would be false precision dressed as calibration. These weights carry no effort axis and no efficiency ranking - the reader chooses nothing here, since the call already happened. A house scorecard's weights win outright.
• The total score is the least interesting output. Report per-dimension scores plus a one-sentence shape reading ("strong open, discovery never tested whether the problem mattered, hollow close") and any fatal moment. A high total with one fatal moment is a worse call than a mediocre total without one - the fatal moment leads the review, never the number.

Evidence rule

The single most important rule in this skill: no quote, no score. Every rubric judgement, every strength, and every change item cites the verbatim transcript passage(s) that earned it, with location.

If no passage supports a judgement, write "insufficient evidence" and leave the dimension unscored or Low-confidence. Never:

• Paraphrase from memory.
• Fabricate a quote.
• Score on vibes.

Conversational benchmarks (talk ratios, question counts) may appear as context only, always labeled. For example, Gong's ~43% talk / 57% listen figure is a vendor claim - correlational, drawn from the vendor's own platform corpus, never independently replicated - and it is never a scoring criterion here.

Bounded feedback

"Managers, please stop giving 10-20 pieces of feedback on calls and role plays. One." (Kevin Dorsey via 30MPC). A rep's capacity for behaviour change is also capped - stacking too many simultaneous changes prevents any of them (Mark Kosoglow's Rep Assessment Matrix argument, 30MPC).

Reconcile that with a full rubric like this: score everything, surface little. The complete score sheet exists for the record - calibration, trend, and the next review's starting point.

The feedback conversation delivers at most 2 strengths (each with its quote), at most 3 change items, and exactly 1 named focus behaviour - the single highest-leverage change, phrased as an observable, re-executable action ("restate the objection before answering it"). That one is what the next review checks first.

"Great energy" is banned: a strength without a quoted moment is flattery, not a strength. Trait-level items ("careless", "low energy", "be more consultative", "not a closer") are deleted from the menu outright rather than ranked last - character language earns no rung here in either direction, and a ruled-out item parked at the bottom silently reappears as scope.

Shape every change item as observation before judgement - situation (quote + location), observable behaviour, impact on the call - the SBI structure (attributed to the Center for Creative Leadership).

Ranking the change items

Four classes compete for the three slots and the one focus behaviour. Effort here is manager coaching time, rep practice reps before the change sticks, and how fast it shows up on a live call - never a currency amount.

• efficiency (pick in this order): fatal slip > structural > local > fatal habit
• value (what the change buys): fatal habit == fatal slip > structural > local
• effort (coaching time, practice reps, time-to-land): fatal habit > structural > local == fatal slip
• compliance cost: fatal rule breach > fatal deal-killer == structural == local

Class	What it is	Value bought	Effort to land
Fatal slip	One deal-killing or rule-breaching moment the rep can simply stop doing	This deal, or the breach, avoided	Near-zero - one quote, one instruction, visible on the next call
Structural	A pattern repeated across this call	Every future call of this type improves	A week - repeated reps to overwrite the pattern
Local	One weak moment with no pattern behind it

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