News & Views | Infinity

How to Use Call Tracking to Evaluate and Improve Close Rates

Written by William Ruddy | Nov 13, 2017 12:00:00 AM

Attributing the number of phone calls to marketing channel source and keyword only gets your marketing and sales team so far.

Ideally, marketing identifies and replicates trends for generating high quality sales calls from those channels to send the sales team’s way. However, if the overall sales team close rates remain low, the marketing efforts are vain.

Read on to learn about unique approaches to evaluating and improving close rates by utilizing visitor level call tracking data.

Call tracking provides visibility on visitor journeys with the best close rates

Granular data from visitor level call tracking, when combined with your CRM and analytics systems, draws a map of each customer journey for your marketing and sales team to analyze and optimize.

Call tracking displays the variation of touchpoints across the customer journey. It shows what creates impact and moves the prospect closer to buying, as well as which touchpoints are obstacles.

The visitor journey data from call tracking is pivotal for granular performance evaluation by salesperson and marketing channel.

For the sales team member with the best close rates, evaluate their customers’ visitor journeys to see:

  • The number of touchpoints and the most influential ones
  • The number of calls and review those calls
  • The ratings of each call

Now you have the data. Is it time to rethink how marketing and sales approach messaging and content in the average customer journey?

Questions you’re not asking – Are close rates impacted by post-sales realities?

As a sales team, it’s critical to seek out every advantage to accelerate the sales process, and at times this may require a different perspective.

Consider looking beyond the goal of a sales conversion. Look at post-sale realities and processes for product adoption and results, and how these factors impact close rates.

For B2B and B2C businesses, marketing and sales teams must focus on cultivating a delightful, high-level customer buying experience. Customers experience these benefits after the sales conversion. The question you’re faced with now is – how do you best communicate and portray product benefits and impact for the customer in the pre-sale period?

The marketing and sales should both attack this challenge.

For the marketing team: Are you creating effective marketing messaging and collateral to reinforce the post-sale benefits for customers?

For the sales team: Are you properly utilizing every piece of marketing collateral at your disposal? Is the collateral relevant to conversations or potential customers landing on product landing pages?

Look no further than Google’s newly released Pixel 2 smartphone as an excellent example of how a company failed to convey the post-sale customer benefits in the pre-sale buying period. The Pixel 2’s setup & support guide provides detailed, easy to access tutorials on how to get the best out of your new device. Although this guide was readily available via the product page, Google could’ve done a better job marketing the phone with the delightful video tutorials through their email marketing before purchasing the phone.

It’s not always about developing and having case studies or top reviews, but it’s about how you leverage that collateral within the greater customer buying narrative. Then once your team implements these changes, do you have the tools and data to analyze the effects (increase in high-quality calls, more engaged conversations, increase in overall close rates)?

See how updated marketing messaging and sales collateral impacts close rates

Implement new content, messaging, and collateral addressing the post-sale realities to impact and improve close rates, and monitor performance. If you adjust messaging and its application throughout the funnel, this alters the timeline and ultimately close rates.

These changes are evident through analysis by reviewing the customer journey with visitor level call tracking.

Learn how to identify correlations between average deal velocity and close rates with call tracking data

Call tracking enables you to identify and calculate average deal velocity from the time a lead is created to when a sales conversion occurs.

After implementing these changes, visitor level call tracking provides marketing and sales teams with the customer journey data to see if these changes shortened or extended the average deal timeline.

As you see from this blog post, there are numerous ways to leverage call tracking to optimize marketing and sales activity. Contact us today to learn more about innovative methods for leveraging Infinity call tracking to improve your sales team performance.