How To Track Calls For Beginners Like A Boss – INFOGRAPHIC

Imagine if you could track calls like you track clicks.

Wouldn’t you like to track the results produced by individual sales reps, individual calls, or calls that come from particular marketing channels?

Once you have this knowledge, you’ll never go back. It’s like going from tunnel-vision to 20/20. The phone is often the critical junction where a sale is made or lost.

I know you’re busy, so to prevent any wasted time for you or your team, I made this guide. Below you’ll find the step by step system I use with my clients to set up basic call tracking from scratch. Also, learn how to move into advanced call tracking (known as call intelligence).

What is Call Tracking?

Basic call tracking is the use of unique numbers (generated automatically) to track the source and efficacy of your inbound phone calls. Use a different number for each marketing campaigns, and your call tracking software can measure the true results of each channel.

Advanced call tracking involves the automatic analysis of phone conversations, pre-recorded voice menus, and auto-scheduled call flows. We’ll cover that later on.

What You Stand to Gain

There are five main benefits to call tracking:

1.     Know your ROI. You’ll know for sure how much money all your marketing efforts (and investments) bring into the business.

2.     Watch the right KPIs. Forget bounce rate. The phone contains much more critical metrics.

3.     Increase call conversion. Inbound calls convert extremely well already, and by tracking results, you can run tests to optimize sales.

4.     Call intelligence. With advanced call tracking, you’ll know the full picture of every lead who winds up on the phone.

5.     Find and fix money-leaks. Uncover gaps in knowledge or skill within your staff that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Know your ROI

Time and again, businesses who try call tracking find huge discrepancies in their sales and marketing systems. You might be pouring money into something you assume is giving you a return when it’s not, and simultaneously ignoring something that’s doubling every dollar you put into it!

Without call tracking, how will you keep your marketing channels accountable? Instead of hearing a monthly tally of keyword rank, bounce rates, unique visits, and other “slightly useful” figures, wouldn’t it be simpler to see how many phone calls each channel has generated for you?

With call recordings, you’ll also know the quality of calls coming from various channels. You can find real gold mines this way!

Watch the right KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are simply metrics that matter to your business.

Many of us working in local SEO have focused on KPIs based on rankings and traffic. Not because they’re necessarily the best metrics to follow, but because it has been easiest to track them for a long time. Relying on these metrics nowadays, however, does not make sense. With the rise of personalized search and internet directories, they miss a lot of conversions.

For example, when someone searches for a local plumber and calls directly from the SERPs, you wouldn’t see that as a click-through. And yet, it could be the hottest lead you got that day! A rankings and traffic report is blind to those valuable phone calls.

Increase call conversion

Calls are highly profitable.

According to Google, inbound phone calls are 10–15 times more likely to convert than inbound web leads. BIA/Kelsey notes that 61% of businesses rate their inbound phone calls as “excellent leads,” while only 52% rate leads from the web as excellent. Most high-ticket products and services depend on phone calls to close the sale, and they’re the most important sales to be tracking!

You can only sustainably improve what you measure. When you know what’s bringing in the most calls, and how many calls vs. sales you get, you can start running tests and optimizing your sales systems. Until then, you’re in the dark.

Call intelligence

Going beyond call tracking and recording, those with the budget can also get “call intelligence” to get to work for them.

· Know how many phone calls are first-time and how many are repeated.

· Get alerted when someone who was on the phone a week ago shows up on your website again.

· Automatically assess the sales skills of your telephone sales reps.

· Track how many times a customer showed interest in purchasing, without having to sit through recordings.

· And much more.

Find and fix money-leaks

It’s time your receptionists and other call agents were accountable for their performance on the phone. It’s not about being “Big Brother” or pointing fingers. It’s about helping them improve and become masters of their job, to become an even more valuable asset to the business that pays their wage!

For example, they might have knowledge gaps that they feel too busy or too embarrassed to mention or fix themselves, leading them to stumble through customer questions and lose sales. Advanced call tracking is great at figuring out where phone performance can be improved.

As long as your workforce is happy to learn (as they should be!), then performance-tracking will be good news for everyone.

 

 

Learn more how to do call tracking like a boss with our Ultimate Call Tracking Guide

Read more on our blog MAN Digital Blog