There are thousands upon thousands of apps and tools to choose from in today’s business world — the problem is, a lot of them are geared for a specific team. It’s easy to find software purpose-built for customer support teams, sales teams, field teams, and so on. All of those tools cost a lot of money, and none of them communicate with each other.
Choosing a different tool for each of your teams causes lots of bloat, lots of budget overage, and lots of silos. That means it’s basically impossible for you to have a complete view of customer and prospect communications, which can cause slip ups that have big financial consequences.
When the budget needs to be cut back, some tools will have to be on the chopping block. Your team-specific tool might be in danger. But what if you had one tool, one unified inbox, that multiple teams could work and collaborate in — one that makes both your customers and your CFO happy?
That’s exactly what our product, Lead Center, accomplishes. It’s designed for everyone from larger businesses with multiple departments to smaller businesses with team members wearing multiple hats. Basically anyone who has contact with customers and prospects can work within Lead Center — and have the ability to see logged interactions across different interactions from everyone.
Let’s dig in a little more on how different teams — sales, marketing, customer service, and finance — can use Lead Center to succeed.
Sales and field teams: A lead is only good if you can follow up on it
Ask any salesperson what one of their main goals is, and every single one of them will mention getting a leg up on their quarterly and yearly quotas. Plus, at some businesses, the team responsible for sales does double duty by acting as a field team and servicing customers during the day. The best sales and field reps are looking for ways to both personalize and speed up their outreach processes.
That’s not so easy, though. Some of the most common pain points for sales and field teams are:
- Inability to predict whether or not they’ll meet quota. Often, there’s not enough information to see what’s ahead in the sales pipeline: how many leads are coming in, which of them are qualified, the value tied to each deal, and conversion rate are all needed to hit goals and quotas.
- Missing calls and leaving texts on “read.” Salespeople are often on the go, and if you’re tied to your desk, that means you’re guaranteed to miss a call or two. The ability to manage existing appointments and new leads on the go grows more and more important each day.
- Lack of knowledge on key info for leads. This is especially painful if you’re picking up a lead where one of your colleagues left off. If there’s no central place for notes, interaction logs, or lead history, you don’t have enough context.
Problem Solved
Our magic bullet? Lead Center, of course. It enables you to respond quickly and with context, and ensures you never leave a customer unanswered. And if you’re in the field? Even better. You can work from anywhere and balance all of your tasks.
- Meet quota, know pipeline health, and qualify and classify leads with Lead Center’s lead management capabilities.
- Remove your tethers to your desk and manage your leads on the go with the Lead Center mobile app.
- Get visibility into every interaction for every lead, from every team member with Lead Center’s unified inbox.
Marketing teams: Identify and grow your most successful campaigns
Are you a marketer responsible for gathering and handing off leads to sales? Is that process as positive as you’d like it to be? In fact, do you have any insight into the lead process after hand off? Our guess is you likely don’t — which means you’re missing out on some valuable info on brand appreciation and marketing effectiveness.
Some of the pain points marketers deal with every day are:
- Rough and confusing marketing to sales hand-off processes which results in low retention rates. There’s often an inability to see whether or not sales teams are following up on inbound leads generated by marketing campaigns. And when marketing and sales teams don’t communicate, they might accidentally provide completely different experiences for customers, making the whole process feel messy.
- Incomplete or inaccurate conversion metrics. A confusing process can cause misattribution, where tracking conversion is based only on inbound calls.
- An inability to forecast and accurately calculate ROI. Remember that issue of having different tools for marketing and sales teams? That affects sales interactions and marketing attribution, too.
Problem Solved
You guessed it: Lead Center can help marketing teams, too.
- Gain visibility into sales followup. You can listen to calls in real-time, catch up on call recordings, and pull stats about lead and team performance.
- Start including outbound calls into your conversion metrics in addition to those inbound calls.
- Keep better track of qualified leads. Your team can qualify or attach a dollar value to leads on live calls, leading to more accurate reporting on marketing campaign success.
Customer service, support, and management teams: Streamlining and improving the customer experience
No surprise here: The most important thing for customer service and support teams and account managers is a top-tier customer experience. The more tools you have, though, the harder it is to create that experience your customers will rave about — and that lack of visibility can hurt you every step of the way.
- Customers can get bounced around and increasingly frustrated. Without visibility into current agent availability or online/offline status, you may have to ineffectually bounce your customers around from person to person.
- You end up getting ghosted by customers. If your customers are on hold too long because you’re jumping between tools to find the right information or jumping between conversations to maintain quota, they’re likely to give up on you and find another (potentially more public) forum to complain to.
- Call backs never work. Often, call backs will come from an unrecognized number — and certainly not the one they called you on. Considering the tendency to not pick up calls from unidentified numbers, you quickly find yourself in a never ending game of phone tag.
Problem Solved
A streamlined solution for nimble customer service and account teams is possible with Lead Center.
- Provide effective warm and cold transfers for your customers through Lead Center. Introduce the customer to another agent before leaving the call or transfer a call directly.
- Implement call queues, live chat, and texting capabilities so your customers don’t ghost you. Provide multiple options for lines of communication in addition to call queues.
- Respond to your customers from a phone number they recognize through Lead Center. CallRail always knows which number your customer has used to call you.
Finance and operations teams: Gain visibility into communication information
Are you surprised to hear that Lead Center can benefit your finance and operations teams, too? Don’t be. Consider the pains these teams go through:
- Reporting on inaccurate forecasts. These teams often have very little visibility into the sales funnel and marketing attribution.
- Handling billing disputes. It’s not uncommon for customer service, sales, and marketing teams — especially social media managers — to have billing conversations with customers. Those conversations often happen where your finance and operations teams can’t get to them.
- Dealing with late payments. Sometimes it’s incredibly difficult for these teams to get in touch with customers and get their bills paid.
Problem Solved
The people in your organization responsible for billing and accounts receivable can benefit from access to information on who called a customer and when — and they may need to receive calls themselves, too.
- Gain access to the campaigns delivering leads and how many qualified leads are coming in. Finance and operations teams are better able to adjust budgets and make accurate forecasts.
- Use customer interaction history in Lead Center to gain insight into exactly what a customer was promised by other teams in all calls, including finance.
- Gain the ability to text customers in addition to calling them in a system that’s easily trackable — not to mention the unified inbox with all communications from any team.
It’s time to get a tool that every customer facing team can benefit from
Imagine every call, text, and chat into and out of your business. Now imagine all of those things in one place. No more one-offs, no missed or unanswered communications, and no more silos. All of this is possible with Lead Center and CallRail.
If you’re only using Lead Center with your sales teams, you should add your other customer-facing teams to gain all of these benefits for your employees and your business.
Not yet using Lead Center? Don’t miss out — try it for free.
