With looming economic uncertainties, the coming months are a completely acceptable time to take a deep, practical look at your balance sheet. This is a time where every business owner is looking to trim the fat off of everyday business expenses, in order to make up for some of the shortfalls in reduced pipeline, shorthanded staffing, or the rising cost of goods due to inflation.
With over 200,000 small businesses served, we hear these concerns firsthand from our customers. However, above the angst, we hear how businesses, like yours, are building their business up to become more resilient and instilling new practices to help them weather this (and future) economic storms.
Let’s take a look at ways that you can echo some of the examples below, to build a more resilient business through the use of CallRail.
3 ways to cut costs and boost revenue
Eliminate wasted marketing spend
At a quick glance, technology can look like low hanging fruit when it comes to reducing spend. If that’s the route taken, the question that typically isn’t asked in return is, “What’s the blowback?” If your business is receiving inbound leads, via phone or the internet, the cost is likely more than you think. Not understanding the relationship between marketing spend and revenue keeps small businesses operating in the dark and severely disadvantages them when facing up against competitors.
Call Tracking and Form Tracking from CallRail allow you to lay out the full customer journey and attribute each inbound lead to either on- or offline marketing campaigns. With this information you’ll be able to effortlessly quantify your leads and revenue, cut poor performing campaigns, and double down on the ones that are actually bringing in business. This is exactly what altLINE Banking, a CallRail customer since 2015, did. altLINE Banking was able to increase online conversions by 108%, lower customer acquisition costs by 39%, and increase online customers by 67% all through Call Tracking from CallRail.
Respond to leads, no matter their entry point
When markets slow, it’s imperative to make the most of leads when they appear because, as many of us would expect, responses that come in less than five minutes are much more likely to convert when compared to slow responses. In fact, according to the Lead Response Management Survey, the odds of making a successful contact with a lead are 100 times greater when a contact attempt occurs within 5 minutes, compared to 30 minutes after the lead was submitted. Additionally, a quick response to an inbound lead provides your prospects with an invaluable positive first impression of your brand and sets you apart from the competition to further increase your chance of conversion.
To aid in improving response times, Call Tracking and Form Tracking will consolidate and centralize all of your inbound leads in one place making sure that none of them are lost in the shuffle. Not only that, but you can automatically route leads by type or tag so that the appropriate representative reaches out. There’s also the option to automate responses to let your prospect know that you’re on it, even if you can’t provide a custom response immediately.
52% of small business owners say that it’s gotten harder to find qualified people to hire compared to a year ago. This unfortunately means you’re bound to miss leads every once in a while, even with all of the above safeguards in place. Within CallRail, the Missed Calls report will give you details on your number of missed calls for each day of the week as well as within each hour in a day. Using data is one of the best ways to maximize your existing resources to ensure leads are answered without burning out your staff.
Implement conversion boosting practices
Set yourself and your business up for success. While it’s impossible to convert every lead, you can greatly boost your efficiency, and overall resiliency, by implementing some best practices to convert more leads as they reach out to your business.
It’s important to give your leads a positive first impression when you connect with them. This means the representative reaching out needs to be empathetic, knowledgeable, and professional. Tools like CallRail’s Conversation Intelligence, explained in greater detail later, allow you to review call recordings and transcripts in detail to gauge the quality of your sales outreach. From there, you can modify the holistic customer experience and boost conversion rates.
It’s also important to understand that not every lead is ready to act immediately and there is nothing you can do to change that. This is why it’s a great practice to create email nurture programs or create content that will help your business remain relevant and valuable to your customer whenever they’re ready to make the purchase.
Red Zone Legal Marketing goes into much greater detail into conversion boosting practices in their guest post.
3 ways to build better operational business practices
Provide top-notch employee training with call recording
Countless hours are devoted to refining the elevator pitch, developing a brand voice, and delivering your unique value proposition as a business. How can you ensure that all of this is being executed correctly by your employees or colleagues without picking up the other line? Furthermore, can you be sure that those talk tracks resonate and remain relevant with your ideal customers?
While Call Tracking helps you uncover where your calls are coming from, Conversation Intelligence tells you what those callers are saying. It provides insights into the requests and sentiments, and it’s the fastest way to elevate your understanding of how your sales and service teams’ conversations are impacting your bottom line.
Automation technologies like Call Recording and Transcription identify coaching and training opportunities for your employees. Conversation Intelligence automates the most manual process of sales training. Implementing these practices will ensure that the leads that do come in are treated consistently and are converted at the highest rate possible.
Use transcripts to identify trends
Having Call Transcriptions in place unlocks multiple opportunities to improve both your marketing campaigns and your overall customer experience. Conversation Intelligence automatically surfaces the keywords or phrases most commonly used in calls so that you can view the channels driving the most calls to your business, and better understand conversion patterns.
It can also help you gain and maintain a competitive advantage by understanding what features, services, or products your competitors’ leads are asking about. Conversation Intelligence uncovers this through the identification and surfacing of important terms that allow you to maximize ad spend and improve lead generation, driving a higher volume of calls at a lower cost.
Create and use reports to track and modify marketing campaigns
In the age of data, business intelligence reports are rapidly becoming the standard. CallRail offers easy to understand reports that automatically identify conversation trends across all of your phone calls and eliminate manual reporting, so you can scale call intelligence across all of your campaigns.
One such report among many is the Key Terms Spotted Report which helps you discover what your leads are saying, monitor sales representative performance, and deliver insights to help you convert more leads into customers.
Become a resilient business with CallRail
It isn’t easy being a small business, but it doesn’t have to be impossible. Innovative technology like Call Tracking, Form Tracking, and Conversation Intelligence from CallRail bring confidence back into Sales and Marketing and eliminate blind operations. Call Tracking takes less than 15 minutes to set up and is entirely free to trial, no credit card required. While there’s certainly no certainty in marketing, CallRail provides businesses the tools to become more resilient, no matter the cards they’re dealt.
Get started with a 14 day free trial and keep your business resilient.
