Traditional call tracking gives us a good starting point but it doesn’t tell us the whole story.
The volume of calls that your marketing is generating is important.
The quality of those calls is critical.
Without an advanced call analytics platform, the process of determining call quality is both time-consuming and challenging. For this reason, many marketers and businesses rely on the duration of a call to give them insight into quality.
This is a bad strategy and we will explain why in more detail below.
We will also go over the metrics that can be extracted with a strong lead scoring platform and how they can be used to enhance sales performance.
The Shortcomings of Call Duration
Although call duration can be a useful quality indicator, it should not be the only metric used to measure the value of a call.
Basing the quality of the lead solely on duration is leaving many businesses in the dark.
This would be akin to web marketers using the time spent on a website as the only indicator of lead quality. The length of time that a lead interacts with a business on a website or phone call is an indication of value but it is not the only factor.
Duration can help to detect bad leads that come through in the form of misdials and spam calls but it neglects to inform of us of what took place on the call itself.
Relying on a single metric offers a limited view of what is taking place on the call. For example, duration does not tell us what the percentage of silence was on a phone call. If a caller is kept on hold for a large portion of the call then call duration can be a misleading quality indicator.
Without using some form of call scoring, marketing and sales departments are not able to design their strategies around complete and accurate data. They also miss out on the opportunity to access call data in near real-time.
True Lead Quality
A wide range of built-in and custom metrics can be extracted from phone calls with an advanced lead scoring platform.
At Convirza, our Conversation Analytics tool takes the content of a call and runs it through our system to pull out all sorts of data. Once the call has been analyzed, a lead score is calculated between 0-100. The higher the lead score, the better the lead is and the more likely it is to convert to revenue.
One important factor that is determined with Conversation Analytics is whether or not the call was a sales inquiry. It also extracts data to tell us if the caller made a price request and information about the dialogue that took place between the caller and the sales agent. This data is essential for determining lead quality.
Improving Sales Performance
Conversation Analytics also provides businesses with data that can be used to improve their sales and increase their revenue. Here are just a few ways to achieve this:
#1 Missed Opportunities
Of all the data that Conversation Analytics extracts from phone calls, this might be the most useful.
A Missed Opportunity is a high-quality lead that failed to convert. This basically means that a caller didn’t make a purchase, reservation or appointment even though they should have.
Marketers and sales professionals can be notified of these Missed Opportunities via email or text message. They can also evaluate the call data to determine why the lead didn’t convert.
Once a notification is sent out, you have the chance to call the lead back and correctly sell them on your product or services.
#2 Asking for the Business
Another metric that can be used to improve sales performance involves whether or not an agent “Asked for the Business.”
The findings of one of our past studies, established a direct relationship between a sales agent asking the caller to make a purchase and the caller deciding to buy.
In fact, they were approximately 4.4X more likely to convert if they were “Asked for the Business.”
With Conversation Analytics, you can quickly determine if your employees are asking for the business and take the necessary steps to improve their performance.
#3 Persistence
How quickly do your employees give up after an initial rejection?
Data from some of our previous studies indicates that being persistent and attempting to overcome objections is an exceptionally important element for success on a sales call.
Asking for the business just one time after the first rejection made the caller 12.6X more likely to convert.
Sales agents that quit too soon are basically shutting the door on potential customers. Conversation Analytics can help you identify sales conversations that suffer from a lack of persistence and provide guidance to recover the lost sales opportunities.
With a comprehensive lead score, you can collect data from every phone conversation to establish goal completions and optimize your marketing and sales efforts. Rather than a limited view of call quality, you can have full visibility into call conversions and whether or not you are working with good or bad leads.
When you can properly leverage the data at your disposal you have to ability to rapidly improve the ROI and bottom line of your business.
