Some Pretty Shocking New Data About Marketing and Phone Calls

Calls are en vogue again. According to BIA Kelsey, 64% of businesses say inbound calls are their preferred type of lead. A call converts to customers 14X more frequently than a web lead.  It takes 4 web leads to produce the revenue generated by 1 phone call.

In short, calls matter.

The problem, traditionally, is that there hasn’t been a way to extract data from phone calls. Thus, marketers have been reticent to focus on driving phone calls as a core part of their business strategy.

That’s changed.

Covnersation Analytics from LogMyCalls analyzes call content using speech recognition technology calibrated by hundreds of thousands of proprietary algorithms. It literally listens to the call, trying to find words and phrases that indicate what happened on the call. It then tracks things like conversion rate, rate of appointment set, rate of purchase, missed opportunities, and lead score.

Earlier this week, we released our Q1 call report. We analyzed millions of call segments across dozens of industries in Q1 and extracted the data in aggregate. We released on an infographic that displays much of the data. We’ll highlight a few individual data points here.

46% of Sales Inquiries Are Missed Opportunities

A Missed Opportunity is a high quality lead that didn’t end up converting. In other words, it is a caller that didn’t convert to sale, reservation, or appointment, but should have.

And a stunning 46% of sales inquiries across dozens of industries and millions of calls in Q1, were Missed Opportunities.

What Does this Mean?

• Opportunity for More Revenue – If 46% of the sales inquiries (which was 42% of the total phone calls) are Missed Opportunities, that means companies are leaving a very substantial amount of revenue on the table. And they could seize this revenue without spending a dime more on marketing. That’s fantastic!
• It’s a Big Number – 46% of sales inquiries are Missed Opportunities. That’s pretty staggering when you think about it. There are opportunities for new selling, upselling, and even higher dollar value selling that are not being taken by sales teams across America.

Missed Opportunities are directly tied to revenue. It isn’t some vague metric. You can literally change your business if you extracted this data from phone calls and acted on it.

Agents Only ‘Ask for the Business’ 13% of the Time

Data we’ve extracted previously indicates that issuing a direct invitation to take an action, makes the caller substantially  more likely to purchase something. In fact, our data shows that a caller is 10.4x more likely to purchase something if they are asked directly by the agent to do so.

That’s a big deal. Asking the caller for their business matters. And it matters a lot.

And because it is so important, it is pretty disturbing that this only happens 13% of the time.

What Does This Mean?

‘Asking for the Business’ matters A LOT – It matters, our data shows, more than any other single element on the phone call. Simply asking the caller for their business is the single most important thing you could do.

And yet, it is done only 13% of the time.

How hard is it to ask a direct question to a caller? For example, if someone calls a hotel inquiring about a room, how hard is it to ask them, ‘So, can we get that booked for you?’ or something like that?

29% of Inbound Calls Result in a Conversion

To gather the data used in the infographic we did a statistical analysis of all of the calls our system analyzed in Q1. These were calls across dozens of industries hundreds of clients.

The data itself is pretty straight forward: 29% of the total calls analyzed in Q1 resulted in a conversion. The only question we perhaps needs to address is, simply, what is a conversion?

A conversion consists of any of the 4 following events:

• Appointment Set – In some industries the best ‘conversion’ is a booked appointment. For example, you don’t buy something over the phone when you call a dentist’s office, you set up an appointment.
• Reservation Made – You make reservations in the hospitality industry, at equipment rental and car rental businesses, and at restaurants.
• Intended Purchase – This is usually in context of bigger ticket items. For example, the person on the phone might say ‘let’s go ahead and do it’ or ‘we’re going to send you the contract.’ In other words, the purchase wasn’t actually made on the call because a contract or another formal agreement needs to be signed, but it is clear, based on the call, that a purchase is intended.
• Actual Purchase – Something is actually purchased over the phone.

A conversion could be any of these events. So, to summarize, in 29% of the calls we analyzed in Q1, one of the four things discussed above happened.

Conclusion

Every business should be tracking this data at some level. What percentage of your phone calls turn into customers? How effective is your sales team? What’s your Missed Opportunity rate? How high quality are the leads you are producing?

The marketing analytics world is changing. Data is power.

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