While some may believe call recording is an old-fashioned method used to monitor calls, we’ve found that it’s an incredibly powerful call tracking tool. Time and time again, we’ve seen CallRail customers use the insight gained from recorded calls to transform their marketing campaigns and train their staff to improve their customers’ experiences. One of the most impactful ways that our customers use call recording is in transforming their lead qualification process.
Efficient lead qualification is fundamental to any successful sales process. According to Gleanster Research, only 25% of leads are sales qualified. Without the appropriate lead qualification model, your organization will waste time and money pursuing the wrong leads. Call recording provides you with the insight that you need to evaluate and build a lead qualification model that will result in a higher conversion rate and increased ROI.
Here are 3 ways to use call recording to improve your lead qualification process.
Align your sales and marketing teams
According to a report by Aberdeen Research, organizations that successfully align their sales and marketing teams can experience 20% of annual revenue growth on average. It’s imperative that sales and marketing teams work together fluidly and seamlessly, and success in this area often begins with lead qualification. Marketing and sales teams should have a clear and consistent understanding of how leads are defined at each stage of the sales cycle, especially at the lead qualification stage. When you record phone conversations, your sales and marketing teams can listen to calls that converted to sales and identify the similarities between them. If they find that many of those leads had the same needs or are in a specific industry, your sales and marketing teams should agree on which attributes should be used to qualify a lead.
In addition to helping sales and marketing devise a consistent definition for a qualified lead, call recording allows your marketing team to properly nurture leads before they even reach a salesperson. Any good marketer wants to provide content that will bring prospects value. Listening to phone conversations to discover the problems that qualified leads are trying to solve provides marketers with valuable information that can be included in white papers, blogs, and nurture emails.
Streamline your sales development process
Now that your sales and marketing organization knows how a qualified lead is defined, it’s time to make sure that your sales development team has the information they need to quickly move the lead to the next step in the sales cycle. In the same way that marketers use information from recorded phone conversations to create valuable content, sales teams can use that knowledge to anticipate the goals and needs of their prospects. Having a clear idea of the discovery questions that should be asked and the information that they should be ready to provide allows your sales development team to quickly move through the discovery call and pass the lead to the next step in the sales cycle.
Another way to streamline the sales development process is to make information that is applicable to callers who are existing customers or who aren’t ready to buy available on your website. When listening to calls, WebMechanix, a full-service digital marketing agency, found that their cyber-security client was receiving many calls from customers looking to renew their product license. While the client was happy that customers were calling to renew their licenses, these calls took time away from the sales teams’ lead qualification efforts. To resolve this, WebMechanix built a licensing component into the client’s website so that customers could easily find what they were looking for and the sales team could focus on qualifying leads and closing deals.
Optimize lead management from the very first call
You know that your marketing efforts are generating good leads, but what happens once those leads pick up the phone and call? A lead won’t become a sale if it isn’t handled correctly over the phone. Recording phone calls gives you the opportunity to ensure that leads properly managed once they reach your business. For example, if the receptionist is routing sales calls to the incorrect department or person, those prospects are less likely to convert to sales. An issue like this would quickly come to light by listening to recorded calls.
It’s also important to ensure that your sales teams are managing leads correctly as well. Listen to recorded calls to ensure that your sales development team is asking the correct discovery questions and only passing qualified leads to account executives. The insight gained from listening back to these calls can be used to evaluate and train sales representatives. Inspree, an online marketing and design firm, used CallRail’s call recording feature to provide feedback to their clients’ sales teams and all of their clients experienced increased conversions.
Are you ready to boost ROI by improving your lead qualification process? Learn on our website how to record phone calls or get in touch with our sales team to start converting leads today.