Call Tracking Metrics: What to Capture for All Outbound Sales Calls
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The key to improving outbound sales calls is in the data. The right call tracking metrics can help your outbound calls become more efficient — creating more leads, and maximizing your return on investment.
Here are the call tracking metrics you should be focusing on.
Understanding Call Metrics
It’s important to differentiate between call metrics and KPIs. Both come together to give you an overall picture of your sales calls, but they have slightly different focuses.
Call metrics are related to the status of your calls, they’re very granular, giving you an instant view of what’s happening. KPIs, or key performance indicators, on the other hand, track performance towards your business goals. They give you an idea of how your calls are helping you to hit your targets, and the return on investment they offer.
Both terms are important to a successful call center. The metrics help you work towards improving your KPIs, allowing you to achieve and exceed your goals.
With improvements in technology, it’s now much easier to track and understand these metrics. In the past, it wasn’t possible to dig down into the metrics in such detail, but with modern software, you can get real-time insights.
This can inform your short-term and long-term strategies, allowing you to get the most out of your outbound sales calls.
Which Call Tracking Metrics to Focus On
Call tracking metrics can be whatever you want them to be. If you decided that the number of words spoken on a call mattered, then you could make this a metric if you wanted. However, there are certain metrics that show a positive correlation to successful outbound sales calls, so it’s important to understand how you perform in these areas.
1. Call Volume
Outbound calls are naturally a numbers game. The more high-quality calls you have, the more likely you are to create leads and make sales.
Call volume is perhaps the most basic call tracking metric, but it’s an important one. If your call volume drops by 25%, you want to know. This may or may not be a bad thing – longer conversations may result in more leads but less call volume. Either way, you need to know your call volume so you can benchmark it against your performance.
With the right real-time insights, you’ll get detailed insights into call patterns, and be better able to adjust strategies and maximize ROI.
2. Call Duration
On its own, call volume isn’t a great metric. It’s only when you see it in combination with other metrics that it becomes valuable. Perhaps the most important metric as it relates to call volume is call duration.
You can have 1,000 ten-second phone calls and they’re probably not going to yield any leads. Making 100 ten-minute phone calls that bring in 10 leads is much more useful.
Longer phone calls tend to produce more leads because you’ve started a conversation and built a relationship. When you have access to comprehensive data on call duration, you can begin to understand how long the ideal sales call should last.
Of course, every sales call is different, and some will take longer than others, but when you average the numbers out, it gives you a pretty good target to work towards. This will allow you to balance quality with quantity, making your sales outreach more efficient.
3. Time of Day and Location
There are a lot of different factors that can decide whether a sales call is successful or not. Two of those factors are time and location.
Time of day metrics help you get a clear picture of when sales calls are most successful. For example, Friday at 4 pm may not be the best time for you to make a call, whereas you may find you create lots of leads from calls on Wednesday mornings. Not every time and day is going to be the same, but if you don’t have this data, then you can’t make informed decisions about when to call.
Likewise, certain locations might not be as profitable for you as others. One area may have a local business selling the same service as you that has the whole market locked down, but a location just a few miles away may be in desperate need of what you offer.
Some locations are going to be more profitable for you than others, so location metrics are an important piece of information.
4. Missed Calls
The whole point of making a sales call is to start a conversation. When the call isn’t picked up, it’s not only a lost opportunity, but it’s also a waste of your salespeople’s time. They spent time going through their call list and waiting for the call to connect with no reward whatsoever.
While you will get missed calls, there are steps you can take to reduce the volume. Combining the missed calls metric with time of day data, you’ll find there are certain times where fewer calls are answered.
By focusing your efforts on the times when people are more likely to take your calls, you can make your sales outreach more efficient, and maximize results.
5. Average Speed of Answer
When you’ve successfully created a lead, and built a relationship with the prospect, they may reach out to you. When this happens, it’s important that a salesperson is quickly on hand to take the call.
It might not seem important, but people can be impatient, and if you’re answering too slowly, then it will cause leads to drop out of your sales funnel. The average speed of answer call tracking metric is there to make sure calls are quickly picked up
Prospects know they have lots of options in the modern world, so they expect fast, knowledgeable customer service, and that starts as soon as the phone rings.
6. Follow-Ups Per Lead
It’s very rare that someone becomes a customer on the first sales call. Instead, it takes multiple touchpoints to guide people through the customer journey.
Follow-ups per lead is an important call tracking metric because it’s a way of judging the quality of your leads. If you see your follow-ups per lead rising consistently, then you have to ask questions about the quality of your leads and how you qualify them.
Too often, salespeople give up after one attempt, and you’ve got to be persistent with your outreach. At the same time though, you’ve got limited resources, and you need to focus on the most promising leads. This is where your follow-up per lead metric can be a big help.
Conclusion
Outbound sales rely on small margins. To be effective, you have to combine volume and quality, and this can be a difficult balance to achieve.
The right software can provide you with real-time call tracking metrics that give you a much clearer picture of how you’re performing. By analyzing the data, you can discover patterns in your calls and set new targets to help boost your ROI.
These call tracking metrics may seem simple, but when they come together, they can have a big impact on the performance of your outbound sales calls.
Luiz Cent is the Head of Sales at Mailshake, in addition to SaaS sales coaching & marketing growth, Luiz is passionate about sustainability, yoga, travel & urban jungles.
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