How to Achieve Integrated Marketing Greatness from Your Most Powerful Sales Tools: Call Intelligence and Your CRM
The customer journey has changed considerably in recent years. Now, whether it’s from the web to phone or vice versa, customers are able to interact with your brand across various channels. However, this has presented a challenge for data-driven marketers: how exactly can you bridge the online-offline gap to profitably acquire customers if you can’t piece their sales journey together?
To help join these gaps from the digital world to the old-fashioned telephone, many marketers are now investing in call tracking solutions. However, simply knowing that a phone call occurred isn’t enough. You need to know why customers are calling, from where they’re calling and then be able to analyze real-life conversations to fully develop your customer relationship management (CRM) system.
With this in mind, here is why integrated call intelligence and CRM systems are your most powerful and profitable sales tools.
Grade Your Calls for Even Better Marketing Optimization
If your business receives phone calls from several marketing channels, knowing which ones are generating the most leads is a standard marketing metric to measure. However, are you actually focusing on how close these calls are to becoming a sale?
Call tracking software allows you to determine how “hot” a lead is by grading the call. This way, you’ll be able to categorize calls to generate even more granular data by linking them to performance and sales. For example, let’s say you’re investing in two channels— PPC (pay-per-click) and social media advertising—but one has generated 15 close-to-purchase sales calls, and the other only five generic inquiries. By now you’ll know which source is generating more valuable calls so you can adjust your marketing spend based on these call scores.
The data acquired through the call tracking software provides live insights that can be plugged into your customer relationship management (CRM) systems; you can then decide whether you’re going to only focus on conversion reporting and optimize the high-quality scoring calls.
Follow-up Leads Based Upon Customer Journey
If your business generates numerous leads over the phone, then knowing how often phone calls play a part in an individual customer’s journey is essential. After all, the customer journey doesn’t end after one interaction, e.g. a phone call, it’s only a single step in developing a customer’s overall relationship with your brand.
Also, not every call is equally important—someone could be phoning to inquire about the opening times on your homepage, while another could be calling from your shopping cart page. They are at completely different stages in the customer journey. However, each call will provide reams of new information about the caller, including product interest, demographic data, buying stage, and customer type.
For an even better insight, marketers should select a call tracking provider’s system which integrates with Salesforce Lighting CRM, the upgraded version of Salesforce, which helps marketers gain more in-depth insights into an individual customer. This brand-new version allows you to push all the rich call data into Salesforce to develop reports on the exact interactions made with each customer. Based on this data, you can then assign the most appropriate employee to manage the unconverted leads within your CRM. For example, if you have a potential customer close to the shopping cart or buying phase, you can ensure that your best sales agent is assigned to nurture this lead.
Orchestrate the Follow-up
Depending on where a lead is in the customer journey, they will require different follow-up approaches. However, it doesn’t appear businesses are always making enough effort to do so as statistics from a study by JMJ Direct have indicated that 48% of sales representatives never follow-up their prospects.
Considering we’re now living in an age where it is more expensive to obtain new customers than keep existing ones onboard, maintaining a consistent follow-up process could mean all the difference between losing and securing a sale.
By pushing customer journey data into CRM platforms, such as that provided by Salesforce and marketing automation systems, you can start to orchestrate the most appropriate follow-up action for each individual customer. Whether it’s through sending a personalized email, personalized website experience, or a relevant retargeting ad, these follow up attempts can enhance the entire customer journey and close more leads.
For example, let’s say a holidaymaker phoned Disneyland Paris to obtain a quote for a potential holiday. As the customer wasn’t certain whether to commit to the purchase, the sales representative has followed up with the lead by sending them an email that includes their “Travel Wish.” They have used clear calls-to-action that encourage the customer to call back and confirm their booking.
Use CRM to Manage Other Audience Targeting Platforms
If you already have access to a list of leads in your CRM database, e.g. previous customers or those who have enquired over the phone, then great. But have you ever thought about how you could be using this to expand your reach further? Yes, maintaining existing customers is important, but you still need to ensure you’re doing all you can to acquire new customers. Also, if you’re using additional marketing platforms, then being able to prove their reach is essential for determining your exact return on investment (ROI).
Though using the right call tracking platform you can integrate this intelligence into your other marketing methods to expand and reach target buyers. For example, integrations with Facebook or AdWords (pay-per-click) make it possible for you to target look-alike audiences from a seed dataset, resembling your customers’ demographic profile—those who have previously picked up the phone and converted. This way you’ll be able to generate the most leads possible out of your additional marketing activity.
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