For businesses of all sizes, understanding where your highest quality leads are coming from is extremely important. Whether you are in marketing and are looking for marketing automation, or in sales looking to coach your team and analyze the quality of your sales reps or sales funnel, it’s pivotal to gain insight into what is occurring during your conversations with leads. So that as the sales funnel grows, your business can maintain efficiency and continue making the best business and marketing decisions possible. This is where call tracking and lead scoring come in, and why they are two key tools for every business.
How call tracking and lead scoring work together
Lead scoring is a method of assigning a classification or value to the leads your business generates. In some cases this is in the form of a numeric value, and in others, it’s a classification of the overall quality of the lead itself. Lead scoring is often based on what the customer is saying during a phone conversation, and how they have already interacted with your brand.
Lead scoring is becoming a must have for marketing automation and optimization, but only 21% of marketing teams have established a system for lead scoring. Why aren’t more businesses taking advantage of lead scoring?
Because every business is different, configuring complex rules requires some effort up-front. Establishing your set of complex rules means being able to analyze historical lead data, and identify the key indicators that led to a conversion. This process requires experimentation and time, which often means digging into your marketing, CRM or lead management platforms.
The true magic, however, lies in lead scoring paired with call tracking. It works out-of-the-box with the click of a button, while also enabling you to create more complex rules when needed.
How can lead scoring help my business?
Increase operational efficiency
Companies of all sizes can save time and money by pairing call tracking and lead scoring. In fact, one business was able to utilize lead scoring to save hundreds of hours for their Sales team by coaching sales reps on lead scoring, which allowed them to discover areas where automation was possible.
One of the main methods to add efficiency with lead scoring is adding a post-call survey. This enables your team to score a lead immediately after the conversation. In most cases, post-call surveys play a message after the call is ended, and allows the agent to add their quality score to the lead. Post-call surveys are simple, straight forward, and effective for small to medium sized teams. They assist in evaluating the quality of the call without having to spend hours going back and listening to conversations between agents and customers.
Additionally, as more companies invest in these solutions, many are implementing a lead scoring model built with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning. These solutions completely automate the lead scoring process by using AI to determine the overall quality of the lead; allowing your team to spend more time focused on what matters most, less time manually classifying leads, and less time listening to past call recordings.
Gain actionable insights
Lead scoring helps businesses analyze their highest quality customers more quickly. Rather than taking time to manually sift through hours of call recordings, handwritten score cards, or unorganized attribution data, you can utilize lead scoring data to gain actionable insights on your customers in a far more organized and effective manner.
From a customer service and sales standpoint, lead scoring also helps recognize opportunities to coach your sales reps who are on the front lines and answering customer questions most.
For marketers and business owners, it’s extremely important to utilize call tracking and lead scoring early on to understand the key indicators of your qualified leads. Today, there is still quite a large disparity in the percent of leads being passed from Marketing teams and the percentage they are qualified by the Sales team (61% and 27% respectively). Establishing this early on can nearly guarantee that all future customers are classified using lead scoring, making your future discovery and decision making even easier as the company grows.
One way CallRail solves this is by allowing users to filter results based on the caller’s lead score. This enables sales and marketing to continually analyze important trends in the data over time and utilize those insights to improve reporting and optimize the business’ marketing campaigns.
Improve reporting accuracy
Robust and accurate reporting is another key functionality of a good lead scoring system. You’ve scored every customer who has called into your business, added them to your CRM, gained insights on the data to continue to grow your sales funnel, but how do you report its success to the other stakeholders? Although reporting in general is a separate entity from lead scoring, it remains an extremely important piece of the puzzle.
Reporting on lead scoring data helps your marketing teams paint a clearer picture of call quality and campaign success. Furthermore, it helps you understand how you are managing and nurturing leads over time. It should come as no surprise that the businesses who are successful in reporting on their leads generally nurture their leads more effectively, which often drives revenue at higher percentage increases.
All this sounds great in theory, but how do you put this to practice, and actually implement call tracking software with lead scoring automation?
How does CallRail utilize AI to automate lead scoring?
CallRail built an automated lead scoring solution (CallScore) using AI and Machine Learning. CallScore is designed as an out-of-the-box solution to save users valuable time and money by automatically predicting the overall quality of a customer.
Technology
CallScore works by utilizing a scoring model that’s focused on transcribing a call and extracting events from the audio. Once a call is completed, the call is transcribed and we pass the transcription and metadata we extract from the call to our machine learning model. Within a millisecond, the scoring model analyzes the conversation, classifies it and tells the user if the person is a qualified lead. This automated lead scoring solution saves time and money, and helps optimize marketing automation efforts by determining which campaigns your qualified leads are coming from, whether from social media, the website, or other lead generation methods.
To date, CallScore has classified over 6 million phone conversations and counting, making it one of the most all encompassing, robust, and accurate classification models for call tracking software. There are additional optional features that utilize CallScore as a building block to report lead scoring data at an even more granular level.
Problems it solves
When paired with additional Conversation Intelligence tools, lead scoring can do more than just report overall lead quality. When paired with CallScribe, Keyword Spotting, and Call Highlights, businesses can more accurately report on the exact events that occur in a conversation.
CallScribe and Call Highlights utilize machine learning and Natural Language Processing to generate a transcription of the call by utilizing the raw audio signals from a phone call. Once complete, the transcription is generated and passed through Call Highlights, which analyzes important and relevant terms that occurred in the conversation, then displaying it to the end user. This end-to-end process gives you the ability to get an at-a-glance look at the entire call without having to click “play.”
Keyword Spotting also helps streamline your lead scoring processes. By setting up a simple configuration that looks for specific keywords and phrases, this machine-learning technology identifies whether those words were spoken during a conversation, and then applies a lead score and tags the call accordingly.
For example, if your business is looking to report on when a prospect becomes a customer and books an appointment, you can utilize Keyword Spotting to recognize when specific words and phrases like “schedule appointment” are said by the customer, add a quality score, and tag the prospect. Then, when it’s time to pull a list of all booked appointments, you can export the calls where the caller was marked as a lead and tagged “New Customer.” This customer can then be added to your crm via a direct integration or webhook.
These methods just scratch the surface when it comes to the additional ways your business can utilize call tracking and lead scoring to further automate your processes.
What does it cost to implement call tracking and lead scoring?
This is perhaps the most important question. Not only does a call tracking software with lead scoring need to be high quality, actionable, and efficient, they also need to be valuable from a pricing perspective.
Lead scoring solutions are priced in a variety of ways, most being based on the amount of users or the amount of qualified leads coming into your business. These can arguably be quite variable, especially for growing businesses who are constantly growing their teams and expanding their sales funnel.
CallRail makes this easy by including lead scoring in all plans for no cost. This even includes CallScore, the AI automated lead scoring solution. In addition to call tracking and lead scoring, businesses looking to take advantage of additional automation features like call transcriptions and Keyword Spotting should look to the Conversation Analytics plan.
For more details on call tracking and lead scoring, and for pricing on Conversation Analytics, visit the pricing page.
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