Hitting sales goals on a budget as a sales lead can be challenging and exciting, but also a bit scary. You have to test multiple sales talking points to find one that is effective enough to help you achieve your goals without burning too much of your budget, and then find the perfect call-tracking software to help you record, track and analyze all your sales calls.
When faced with this challenge, knowing how to properly use call tracking for sales and marketing could be the difference between team excellence and putting out daily fires.
Call tracking helps you stay on top of your sales call performance, avoid mixing up different kinds of potential customers, and even help you save up on the cost of getting new customers.
In this article, we will talk about what call tracking entails and how each part of call tracking complements each other in meeting business needs and goals.
What is Call Tracking?
Call tracking helps businesses understand their phone calls. It shows them who called, why they called, and what happened during the call. This can be done with simple tools like notes or spreadsheets, or with more advanced software such as PressOne.
Call tracking aims to help your sales teams efficiently reach out to different customers at each stage of their journey. It also helps your sales teams stay organized and allows them to keep sales records they can revisit to improve their processes. More importantly, it allows your sales team to close more deals easily.
But first, here’s how NOT to track calls as a salesperson…
1 . Tracking poorly logged/ poorly tagged calls
Not all sales calls are the same. Potential customers are usually segmented into four major groups, and failing to use standardized tags or keywords can impede the organization process, making it difficult to analyze and filter calls.
2. Incomplete recording
Your call tracking efforts could be ineffective if you miss certain parts of an interaction with a customer or fail to record some crucial moments like customers’ concerns or objections.
3 . Poor note-taking
You could lose or forget important details if you fail to take clear and timely notes. Your notes should also include timestamps (the exact time that something important was said), as it makes it easy to look up that information in the future.
4 . Allowing personal bias into analysis
Interpreting calls through a biased lens is largely unproductive when tracking calls for impact during sales efforts. Because of your bias, you could develop blind spots, leading to inaccurate conclusions and ineffective strategies.
5 . Overlooking key moments
This could mean failing to identify and mark important moments in the call, like customer pain points, or decision-making cues. Interpreting the details of your call without first deciding on the most important details to look for means that you may end up working with blind spots that hurt your sales game. It leads to wrong ideas, wasted insights and inaccurate sales plans.
6 . Conducting follow-up in an inconsistent manner
Not scheduling follow-up calls will mean that you don’t give yourself enough chances to convert a customer, leading to missed opportunities and neglected customer needs.
7 . Reviewing anytime you want
Call tracking should be done consistently and continuously; simply doing it once or twice a month or whenever you feel like it, is not enough. You need to schedule analysis and constant review of your sales and marketing efforts until measurable progress can be recorded. Only then can you say that you have executed call tracking effectively.
Now that we’ve talked about the approach NOT to take when tracking calls, let us explore the common metrics that can be tracked during calls, the kinds of calls that can be made during sales efforts, and how tracking can be used to make these processes more effective for sales and marketing.
Common Indicators To Look Out For When Tracking Calls
1 . Duration of the call
The length of the call could help identify areas where conversations may be too long or too short, and also help inform the direction of your enquiries and improvement efforts.
2 . Talk-to-Listen Ratio/ Frequency of interruption
The percentage of time spent talking vs. listening could provide insight into the active listening skills of a particular agent and whether that is great for sales or not, as well as the optimal number of interruptions per sales call for desirable results.
3 . Analysis of the emotional tone of the conversation
Call tracking using intelligent software can also analyze the emotional tone of the conversation (positive, negative, neutral) to identify areas for improvement. Especially when it comes to your customer success teams, being able to understand the customer’s satisfaction levels will make your teams more empathetic and more responsive to complaints. Press One‘s analytical AI tool is particularly good with this.
4 . Type of follow-up questions asked
Insight into the number and phrasing of follow-up questions asked could help to ensure a thorough understanding of customer needs, and the words and phrasing customers respond best to.
5 . How objections are handled
During tracking calls, paying attention to how customer concerns and objections are handled could provide insight into the most frequently raised concerns. This provides insight into the best way of answering these questions, increasing effectiveness in this part of your sales call.
6 . Adherence to sales scripts
Call tracking can help you measure how well your sales personnel stick to sales scripts and talking points, effectively helping you pinpoint the kinds of deviations that are frustrating (or even helping) your sales process.
You can do this by assigning a qualitative score to each portion of the sales script, and for every time there is a marked and unhelpful deviation from the pattern, that segment is flagged and a point is deducted. The cumulative score would then help you decide the level of script adherence for the particular agent.
When giving feedback, however, be sure to pinpoint specific areas and give actionable tips for improvement.
7 . How well you communicate your product’s unique value
Looking into the frequency and clarity of communicating the product/service’s unique value, and testing different scripts at different frequencies will eventually land you the optimal script and frequency per customer segment.
8 . Customer Engagement
Tracking the level of customer interest and engagement during the call could help improve the calling strategy for the different kinds of customers you may have. In the same vein, if a particular agent constantly makes customers feel a certain way (whether a good way or a bad way), it could be a sign that could help you make better business decisions.
9 . Call Outcome
The results of the call (e.g., sale, follow-up, rejection) could help track progress and measure the effectiveness of talking points, demeanour (tone of the agent) and the general approach to segmentation.
These are a lot of metrics, and at this point, I’m quite sure you’re asking:
- Am I supposed to track all these?
- Which is the most important one?
- What tools do I use for tracking?
Download this FREE easy-to-use call-tracking template for your business
What are the most important metrics to track per call?
At every point in your company’s customer acquisition process, there will be at least, 4 buckets that customers may be grouped into:
- Fresh leads
- Scheduled calls
- Follow-up
- Enrollment
1. Fresh Leads
These are people that are interacting with your business for the first time. They may come as referrals, website visitors, waitlisters or even potential customers who have requested a demo or brochure of your product and services. During a call with a fresh lead, you will:
- Share a bit of what you’re offering
- Speak to their pain point
- Ask to get on a webinar/ sales call depending on your funnel; you don’t need to share all the details
Such calls are expected to be clear, concise and compelling, and there are 3 major metrics to improve on during these calls:
- Value proposition: This should be clear and compelling, and repeated enough times to eliminate confusion. Frequently asked questions should be taken note of and the script should be regularly adjusted to accommodate these questions.
- Call-to-action: Should be powerful and on the nose with a low barrier for entry.
- Call duration: These kinds of calls should aim to be very short, sweet and twice as effective as an email that might not be opened.
2. Scheduled Calls
These are leads that have scheduled a one-to-one call with someone on your sales team, signed up for a webinar, or agreed to attend an info session. These potential customers are interested but need an extra push to convert into paying customers. At this call, you are expected to:
- Identify the most important pain points and show how your product can provide timely solutions
- Take important notes about the customer’s peculiar solution. PressOne’s tag feature can help you take notes while on the call and adequately segment your customers.
- Properly handle objections
- Identify decision-makers in the customer’s situation and decide on the best way to get them on board.
Now, what metrics do you need to optimize for these kinds of calls?
Metrics like level of script adherence, call outcome, frequency of interruptions and objection handling will provide insights into the quality and effectiveness of the call.
3. Follow-up
This group is made up of potential customers who, for one reason or the other, are still on the fence about taking your product. Because of this, being able to track customer engagement, sentiment analysis and the types of objections raised, could help you figure out why they are on the fence, and help you do the right thing that will help you make the sale.
4. Enrollment
These are leads that have made a decision to become a customer and are in the process of payment, payment confirmation and onboarding. Tracking the most frequently asked questions could help the product team streamline their onboarding process and curate a better experience for users.
What tools can you use for call tracking?
PressOne. PressOne is more than just a business phone service, It is a phone system that powers business growth. In addition to giving your business special phone numbers, Press One also allows you to:
- See incoming and outgoing calls in your business in real-time.
- Have access to recordings without having to use a third-party recording tool
- Use Press One’s call queue feature to assign leads to your sales team and organize both potential and scheduled leads using the call tag feature.
- Actively fast-track your note-taking process by giving a summary of calls with shared call notes.
- Get a quick overview of how your team is performing from the easily accessible analytics dashboard.
Press One is the single solution to all your call tracking issues, in the form of an easy-to-use, super affordable service. Want to see it in action?
