B2B Call Tracking: Get Credit for All B2B Leads By Caring About Phone Calls
What’s your biggest challenge as a B2B marketer?
According to a study sponsored by Eloqua, the biggest challenge for B2B marketers is generating enough high quality leads. Converting leads into customers came in 2nd. And demonstrating ROI came in 4th.
As a B2B marketer myself, I can relate to these challenges.
The other interesting metric is one that we have gathered over the past 12 months: only about 15% of B2B marketers care about, or measure phone calls.
That’s a big deal. Measuring and caring about phone calls can solve—or, at least mitigate—the problems most B2B marketers face.
Generating Enough High Quality B2B Leads
Last Fall we crunched some numbers involving our own B2B landing pages and the landing pages of several B2B clients. These landing pages offered things like White Papers, eBooks, and webinars.
Each landing page had a form for leads to fill out as well as a call tracking phone number at the top of the page. Each page generated several hundred form fill outs and only a couple dozen phone calls.
Interestingly, however, the callers received a demo 30% of the time, while the web leads only ended up receiving a demo of LogMyCalls about 8% of the time.
Long story short: the phone calls actually produced more total demos AND more total revenue even though there were 12x more form fills than phone calls.
The phone calls were better leads. They were leads that were lower in the funnel. These results were consistent across several landing pages we created and several of our clients’ landing pages—all B2B companies.
Calls are valuable.
According to BIA Kelsey it takes 4 web leads to produce the revenue generated from 1 phone call. Research from Conversion Sciences actually puts the number higher. They say that a phone call is worth between 5x and 10x more in revenue than a form fill lead.
Bottom line: if you want to generate more high quality leads, generate more phone calls. Place call tracking numbers on your landing pages, on your website, and on your collateral. Give your leads the option to call. You’ll notice revenue start to rise.
Converting leads to customers
Did you know that only about 2% of B2B web leads end up converting to customers in the next 6 months. On the other hand, a whopping 25%+ of B2B phone calls end up converting to customers.
We know this information because of our new feature, Conversation Analytics. We just released it a few weeks ago. It actually ‘listens’ to the call using sophisticated speech recognition technology and then determines what happened on the call. It can tell you, for example, if the call resulted in a follow-up appointment, purchase, or a missed opportunity. It can generate lead quality information, tell you how price sensitive a customer is, and even measure sales performance. It does all of this based on the words and phrases said on the call.
Think about it this way: Call tracking tells marketers what happened before the calls (i.e. which ads, campaigns, and keywords generate calls). Conversation Analytics tells you what happened ON the call.
For example, if Conversation Analytics ‘hears’ the phrase ‘confirmation number’ and ‘credit card number’ within 20 words of each other, we can state with an extreme level of confidence that a transaction took place on the call. If Conversation Analytics hears the phrase ‘call back tomorrow,’ it will know that a follow-up action is needed.
Conversation Analytics tracks conversions for every call automatically.
So here’s the question: what’s your call conversion rate? How many callers end up converting to customers.
Demonstrating ROI
This is the oldest problem in the book. How do I show that what I’m doing is working? How do I prove ROI?
Obviously calls can help with this problem too. LogMyCalls call tracking can pull lead source reports, showing you which marketing efforts generated which calls. And Conversation Analytics can show you which of those calls converted to customers, which ones were missed opportunities (so your sales team can follow up on them), and show you precisely how well your sales team is performing.
Calls Matter. Deep Call Data Matters
Gartner says that more than 420 billion words are spoken each day on business phone calls. A lot of really important things happen after the phone rings.
And sadly, traditional call tracking misses ALL of that data.
Phone calls and data from phone calls will largely solve the biggest problems B2B marketers face. I know. I’m a B2B marketer.
Learn more about Conversation Analytics and download The Quick Guide to Conversation Analytics
McKay Allen is the Inbound Marketing Manager at LogMyCalls. He has spoken at events like SMX, SES, and the Social Media Strategies Summit. Hi writing has appeared in Search Engine Journal, Mobile Marketer, Direct Marketing News, Social Media Examiner and Target Marketer.