TL;DR:

• Digital engagement is a fount of data that can fuel your marketing analytics, but phone interactions are also full of important information about your customers’ needs and wants, and the effectiveness of your sales strategy.
• Call tracking software can convert the contents of each phone call into data points that can be digested and interpreted through an analytics solution. This is a valuable tool that helps organizations identify the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of their sales strategy.
• Ultimately, sales data can be used to improve lead scoring practices, deliver higher-quality leads to the sales team, and improve sales reps’ performance.

Call tracking software provides crucial visibility into the role inbound calls play in your larger marketing strategy. But once you get on the phone with a sales lead, that interaction can dictate the course of your relationship with that prospect, for better or for worse.

Sales call analytics can help fill in the blanks, using innovative technologies to generate data points and discover meaningful insights that inform your sales and marketing teams.

Top benefits of sales call analytics

Sales call analytics also help your business achieve new efficiencies in its customer approach, providing visibility into performance for individual sales reps, and the sales team as a whole. Specific benefits include the following:

• Collecting call data for your sales team, saving time on note-taking
• Formatting data that can be shared with leadership and other teams (customer service after the sale is made, or marketing for insights on lead quality)
• Providing insights into specific reps’ performance (identifying who is most effective)
• Providing insights into the performance of messaging (identifying what language is most effective)
• Reviewing the frequency that competitor information is discussed within the call (features, integrations, etc., and how to handle those conversations)

Many businesses don’t have any hard data covering this critical function of their operations. Call tracking software provides easy access to this data, improving the sales team’s performance as well as the collaboration between sales and marketing.

The importance of sales call analytics data

Call tracking software can convert the contents of each phone call into data points that can be digested and interpreted through an analytics solution. This is a valuable tool that helps organizations identify the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of their sales strategy.

The importance of sales call analytics data

Call tracking software can convert the contents of each phone call into data points that can be digested and interpreted through an analytics solution. This is a valuable tool that helps organizations identify the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of their sales strategy.

Common sales call data points include:

• Lead origin: The referral source for an inbound call doesn’t just affect your company’s marketing attribution models. Sales teams can use the lead origin to provide a sales pitch or engagement strategy that aligns with the messaging that prompted a call.
• Customer sentiment: Do callers seem engaged and interested, displaying strong intent? How does the progression of the phone call, including the sales tactics used by your sales reps, affect these sentiments, for better or for worse?
• Call duration: How long are customers on the phone with sales reps? How does the length of a call correlate with the customers’ conversion intent, or their likelihood of converting, either on the phone or in the future. In general, the longer a customer is on the phone with a sales rep, the more likely they are to become a conversion.
• Buyer intent: By combining sales call data with other data points, such as prior website visits and frequency of website visits or calls, sales teams can quickly evaluate the likely intent of a buyer based on their past behaviors — including those taking place outside the phone call itself.
• Call conversion rates: How successful are your sales reps when it comes to securing conversions? Evaluate sales performance as a team and as individuals, and establish conversion goals to motivate your team.
• Missed-call response times: The longer sales reps wait to return a missed call, the less likely they are to secure a conversion. Analyze missed-call response times and use this data to recommend strategic changes that minimize the waiting time for your prospects.

In addition to these commonly used data points, your organization may use other sales call data points to evaluate performance and learn more about your customers. Because even the content of calls can be data-mapped by call tracking software, there are endless ways you can analyze this data to generate insights that improve your sales call strategy.

How call analytics can help qualify marketing leads

Sales calls can help you gather the information you need to qualify marketing and sales leads. Combine past engagement behaviors with data collected during a phone call to compare each caller’s criteria with the preset parameters used to identify and score leads at your company.

Sales call analytics allow for greater context and nuance when you’re evaluating leads, enabling sales teams to organize leads under a few different categories. Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are leads who have been judged to be more valuable based on marketing analytics and lead intelligence tools. This process is known as “lead scoring,” and it can be largely automated through your CRM.

Once the lead hits a certain score, they’re passed off to sales for another round of lead qualification. MQLs are a great starting point, but they aren’t foolproof. Sales qualified leads (SQLs) are MQLs who have demonstrated some interest in speaking with a sales representative. Once a lead with a certain score is ready to take the next step, they’re passed on to sales from the marketing team.

But there’s another step that is crucial to optimizing your sales team’s performance, as well as the back-and-forth relationship between marketing and sales. A sales accepted lead (SAL) is an SQL who has undergone the research, vetting, and approval of a sales team, which has then deemed them worthy of pursuit.

The marketing team may give a lead a high score, and the lead may be ready to speak to a sales agent. But SALs are produced only when the sales team has reviewed the profile of a lead and deemed them worthy of engagement. For some businesses, interested leads may not represent enough of a revenue opportunity to warrant pursuit by the sales team. An SAL is confirmed to meet this standard and should be engaged quickly by a sales rep.

Data from sales call analytics can also help determine whether the marketing process, prior to the phone conversations, is doing a good enough job of qualifying leads before they reach the sales team. This data can be used to revise your marketing strategies accordingly, in hopes of improving your lead generation and lead scoring practices, supporting sales enablement, and making better use of those phone conversations.

Using call analytics to retain higher-quality leads

Even as you’re using call analytics to improve the quality of the leads who reach the inbound sales team, you can continue to refine your sales call approach by tracking your performance and how various strategies are received by the prospect.

For example, different calls to action, such as an offer for a free trial, may receive more engagement — and lead to more conversions — than trying to push for a purchase during the call. In other cases, you may discover that misaligned messaging between marketing and sales campaigns is adversely affecting your close rates.

Many smaller insights are likely to be revealed through sales call analytics as well. It’s rarely one big flaw that’s holding your sales team back from greater success. Instead, an optimized strategy may implement a number of smaller changes that refine your approach to improve your lead conversion rates.

What to look for in a sales call analytics tool

Ready to invest in sales call analytics? Your choice of tool carries enormous implications for your ability to create value from this technology. Seek out an analytics tool that offers the following features:

• Recording and transcription features that help you evaluate call performance
• Keyword-level call tracking that tells you which ads are driving the most phone calls
• Call highlight data created from the content of your phone calls
• Lead response optimization features, such as call routing and missed-call notifications, that support your sales team
• Seamless integration with other analytics tools, so you can consolidate data and enjoy an unobstructed view of your marketing and sales teams’ performance
• Performance analytics that help you assess your entire sales team and individual team members

Get more from your customer conversations

Inbound phone calls offer too much valuable data to be ignored. While marketing departments are able to fill the gaps in their attribution models and optimize their overall performance, sales can use call tracking software to analyze its own performance in ways that were never before possible.

Through automated analytics as well as manual monitoring and evaluation, call tracking can be a powerful tool for elevating your sales performance both now and in the future.

Request a demo of Lead Center to track and manage your leads from beginning to end.