Call tracking isn’t solely used for attributing calls back to marketing source and keywords. Smart marketing and sales teams leverage actionable insights to optimize the joint marketing sales funnel, and ideally increase calls that generate sales conversions and revenue.
Session level call tracking works for short sales cycles. Attribution data from visitor level call tracking provides a comprehensive view of the entire visitor journey.
Context – know what the visitor wants when they call
In a previous blog post, I discussed why session level call tracking is inferior to visitor level call tracking. Visitor level call tracking fills in the gaps where session level falls off. See the exact visitor journey, pageviews, time spent on specific pages, and website goals completed (form submissions, call-to-action clicks, inbound calls) beyond a single website session.
For Marketers: You can’t ever know the exact visitor intent until you speak with them, but visitor level tracking gives you critical insight into what marketing channels, messaging, onsite content, and call-to-actions influenced the visitor to act.
Context enables marketers to remove obstacles in the visitor journey. They identify the context of high value customers to replicate future customer journeys.
For Sales: When speaking with a new business lead, would you rather start with a partial or full picture of the person’s story? Visitor level call tracking gives you the complete picture to grasp the visitor intent before assessing buying readiness.
Sales teams see immediate insight into the whole customer journey with a specific view of the research phase for products and features.
Funnel Velocity – From Lead Creation to Sales Conversion
Session level call tracking stays connected to the visitor for one session. Visitor level call tracking provides a detailed view of visitor activity up to one year or longer.
For B2B businesses with longer sales cycles, the extended time frame proves vital to accurately measuring and attributing conversion data.
Organizations running account-based marketing programs require detailed visitor level call tracking to deliver the data required to measure points of influence to engage and land large enterprise accounts.
With Infinity, you have a complete view of a visitor’s journey to see the marketing source, website actions, website goals completed, opportunities created, and closed deals over an extended time period.
Since we have access to the complete visitor journey, this enables us to more efficiently measure the average funnel velocity (from lead creation / new visitor to sales conversion).
For Marketers: These metrics give insights into the marketing and sales process as one complete funnel where both parties share accountability. Marketers view the timeline to identify critical moments to optimize the visitor journey, such as:
- Time gaps between website visits and interactions
- Bounce and exit pages
- Pages that lead to actions
- Time spent on pages
- Number of pageviews
Diving deeper into analysis will identify average deal size attributed to each channel and the expected time frame for the deal to close.
For example, let’s assume that an ad group in AdWords Paid Search targets one of your competitor’s brand keywords. Over the previous three months, five of the conversions resulted in sales conversions of closed deals with an average funnel velocity of 14-30 days and average deal amounts fell within an ACV of $2,000 - $5,000 range.
It’s critical for marketers to have this data to measure against their budget spend.
For Sales: Once the marketing team has enough conversion data (from marketing channels and sales conversions), then sales can start to add more realistic expectations for new leads and opportunities based on lead characteristics, lead sources, and engagements with marketing activities.
These insights enable salespeople to produce accurate monthly and quarterly forecast numbers. Otherwise they’re constantly playing guessing games, shifting opportunity values based on inconclusive deal velocity data.
Knowing the average deal length only gets you so far. For example, here are some benchmark metrics for B2B SaaS sales cycles1 from Jason M. Lemkin, Co-founder of EchoSign (acquired by Adobe – grew total business from $0 to $50m ARR):
- Deals < $2,000 in ACV should close on average within 14 days.
- Deals < $5,000 in ACV should close on average within 30 days.
- Deals < $25,000 in ACV should close on average within 90 days.
- Deals < $100,000 in ACV should close on average within 90 -180 days depending on # of stakeholders and gates.
- Deals > $100,000 in ACV will take on average 3-6 months to close. Of course, some faster, some shorter. But on average.
The above information is only for B2B SaaS and each industry will vary. The benchmarks are informative and give a sales team structure, but there are always exceptions.
Identify high value leads with multi-touch attribution
Understanding visitor context and lead source empowers the sales team to conduct smarter conversations with leads. Identifying average funnel velocity for deal types (segmented by size, industry, additional factors) sets realistic goals for marketing and sales KPIs while providing actionable insights on where to optimize the marketing and sales funnel.
Visitor level call tracking brings it all together through the ability to see multi-touch attribution. Session level call tracking works for marketing and sales teams with short, transaction focused sales cycles that don’t rely on numerous touchpoints across marketing channels.
Take the automotive industry as an example. Clarivoy reports that 77 percent of auto dealers use first and last click attribution models, but these models produce poor results and a skewed picture of what sources truly influence customers in their buying decisions. Also, 46 percent of these auto dealers want to see multi-touch sales attribution to prove ROI for marketing spend.
Session level call tracking is limited to first and last click attribution models. Visitor level call tracking produces the full multi-touch conversion path for buyers in automotive, travel, and other industries to perform multi-touch attribution.
This data empowers marketing and sales teams to identify the best purchase paths with inbound call leads most likely to convert into sales.
Upgrade to visitor level call tracking for these insights
Start a smart conversation with us on how Infinity call intelligence benefits businesses with accurate attribution data through visitor level call tracking.
References
1) "What is a good benchmark for B2B SaaS sales cycles?", Quora.
2) “2017 State of Automotive Attribution Report”, Clarivoy, (August 2017)
