How To Track Leads From Incoming Calls In Your Sales Process 2023

Businesses thrive through customers, both new and loyal ones. They are the converted leads who see the value that your products or services are bringing into their lives.

But to convert leads into paying customers, your sales team must track and follow up on them. Some of the first calls can be treated as the journeys first step, which is when leads cold-call for product or service information.

How To Track Leads From Incoming Calls In Your Sales Process

Here are ways to keep track of your leads.

1. Use Lead Scoring And Grading

The number of calls a person makes to your business can indicate interest. It is a behavior that you can track with lead scoring.

Lead scoring helps you determine the likelihood of customers purchasing your product through their behaviors and actions. It helps sales agents identify which leads should be prioritized.

You can assign a score for various actions, such as inbound calls made, filling out forms, or clicking on an email. Each one will hold a different weight and place the prospect on your priority list.

It will help you pinpoint which one to guide as a lead and convert into a paying customer.

The process can begin in marketing, where marketers create various strategies to attract the attention of leads. When leads call for information, the agents they call must be able to satisfy the interactions with high-fit prospects.

The prospect's scores increase, and they get more attention and follow-ups.

Here's how you can create specific criteria for lead scoring:

• Analyze your past contacts to see what they have in common.
• Look for similar attributes of past contacts who have yet to become customers.
• Assess attributes and decide which ones should be weighed heavily depending on how likely they are to become a good fit for your products or services.

There are also factors you can use to create your scores:

• How much the leads problem fit with your offer
• The decision-maker's level of engagement
• The time frame of purchase
• Implementation time
• Status of budget
• Your opportunity size and scope
• The opportunity size and scope for your lead

Both the marketing and sales team should agree on the benchmark scoring to determine if the lead will be forwarded to sales.

2. Utilize Call Tracking Software

Imagine if you could automatically get information from your leads who call and converse with any of your sales team members. You'll be able to pinpoint which marketing effort or strategy led to the phone call.

If your business uses a call tracking software similar to WildJar, you can tell which advertising channel your leads have noticed. Call tracking software can inform you if your leads have called before.

Different Types Of Call Tracking

Dynamic Or Visitor-Level Phone Tracking

A business that uses dynamic phone tracking generates trackable phone numbers assigned to web visitors to create marketing strategies.

These numbers inform about customer journeys and where these customers emerged from, like pay-per-click or SEO.

It also uses dynamic number insertion or DNI. DNI relies on a JavaScript snippet to set a phone number featured by a webpage or an ad.

It is done by searching through a pool of trackable domestic, international, or toll-free numbers.

This type of call tracking records the caller's name, phone number, time, and call date. It is also a tool that can help you get information on the efficiency of your marketing efforts.

Visitor-level call tracking can tell you to optimize your website content so it can provide visitors with the information they need.

At the same time, you can further improve your customer service to address customers needs better.

What's more, this tracking allows businesses to connect leads to campaigns or keywords to create a specific engagement. Call attribution captures the leads profile information using the number assigned to an ad campaign or landing page.

You can use the data with other marketing software to give you some insights into what occurs online and offline, which can help improve conversion rates. Finally, you can use campaign-level call attribution to follow up on leads who call your business.

Source-Level Call Tracking

This type of phone call tracking allows you to determine which online or offline marketing campaigns direct the most leads to your business.

You can test the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns through source-level call tracking, also known as A/B test campaigns.

For example, you can test print ads against pay-per-click ads to see which strategy results in more calls. You can see which marketing channel drives you the most ROI.

It is easy to set up since you only need to assign one tracking number to each campaign manually.

You can track where your leads are coming from using the phone number. It also allows you to measure calls from individual campaigns, making it easier to attribute calls.

The call tracker you're using will report the source of your leads. Similar to visitor-level, you can use DNI to integrate with single source tracking.

Once a user reaches your website through those sources, your assigned tracking number will be displayed.

It also generates side-by-side marketing channel comparisons for reporting to help you allocate a good portion of your budget to the best one.

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3. Use A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Program

CRM is beneficial for lead tracking, especially because you can follow up with customers who call your business to ask questions about a product or service.

You can use CRM software and marketing attribution, which evaluates specific points that lead to a closed deal or sale.

In a way, it is similar to using a separate phone number for marketing. But using marketing with CRM helps provide more information on your campaigns online, which keywords to use for your campaigns, and which content can help you earn more revenue.

Your CRM software also lets you see where the customers tend to drop out in the journey. Once you become aware of the leakage in the pipeline, you'll be able to address the problem immediately.

CRM has features that will allow you to track the details of your customers and interactions.

Here are the many other benefits of the software for your business:

It provides better customer service

The software is primarily used to improve your business relationship with your customers. It is a contact management system that fetches customer information.

Your team can gather purchase history, demographics, and
messages across different channels.

The system is also accessible to anyone in the company as long as they are authorized. CRM can offer customer satisfaction because the team can use the information they gather to address the lead properly, like addressing them using their names.

It is also instrumental in keeping the converted customers coming back for more.

Your sales team has to work hard to maintain them using behavior tracking, sentiment analysis, and customer support automation that helps you solve
problems faster for leads and customers.

The system provides detailed analytics

It can offer insights on how to use gathered information effectively. CRM software has tools that can help break down information into understandable metrics.

You can see bounce rates, click-through rates, and other
demographic data that help you analyze your campaigns and strategize how to optimize your ads.

It is always best to reward the most loyal customers you have. These people are the ones that love what you have to offer as a brand and the ones who spend the most money on your business.

Sometimes, the ones with the following will also recommend your company to their audiences, despite a non-existent partnership. But CRM changes that and allows you to recognize your top customers by building and maintaining a relationship with them.

CRM will enable you to track these individuals who frequent your business to buy something. You can reach out to them to offer exclusive discounts and special offers.

4. Use A Lead Management Program

Sales teams must have lead management software. It primarily captures, tracks, and stores quality leads in your database.

Sales teams must convert these leads into customers, and once they do, the primary role of the lead management system ends. Lead management software also helps business organizations qualify leads.

Sales teams can guide them by answering queries and explaining about products and services until they decide to make a purchase. These leads are from other channels that enter the software and those likely to be customers.

Lead management software is sometimes compared to the CRM system because of its lead management nature.

But while CRM increases the lifetime value of the customers, a lead management system fetches potential customers for the business.

You can use both systems because the leads you find from the lead management system can be grouped into the ones in the CRM system.

Here are some more benefits of lead management software:

If you have to categorize your leads, you won't have to do it manually using lead management software. It uses granular segmentation that divides leads into groups with similar factors.

That's also why customers who experience customized engagements are more likely to choose businesses that do. Lead management software groups lead by location, age, loyalty points, and more, allowing sales teams to tailor their interaction with them.

Sales agents can effectively use lead information to transform leads into paying customers. Sales management is improved when leads can engage with suitable sales agents.

It also provides analytics on your sales team performance to allow lead distribution criteria, identify the best sales representatives who deserve incentives, and understand why some representatives did not perform as well.

Sales teams have the role of guiding leads and turning them into customers. Once they are able to satisfy the needs of the leads, they are easier to invite to buy a product or service.

It is not an easy feat, but by making touchpoints easier throughout the sales cycle, you can pull them from acquisition to advocacy.

Time is of the essence in any business, and lead management software cuts down the time it takes to convert leads into paying customers. The systems make the stages of the buying process faster because your team is allowed to prioritize leads depending on their purchase history.

That information alone tells you that they are the most likely to spend money on your business.

The system has this data, and you can make strategies that will help you pinpoint leads according to hotness, warmness, or coldness. The leads coming in are also reported in real-time, making sure you are informed about the hot leads so you can contact them first.

There are different ways to track leads that start from simply setting up additional phone numbers for campaign ads to using different software that you can integrate with separate systems.

You are free to choose which ones you can use for your business depending on the simplicity or how advanced you want the system to be. The important thing is to weigh your pros and cons to ensure that what you use will benefit you from the get-go.

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Takeaway

You can track leads from incoming calls in your sales process through various means. You can do this through lead scoring and grading to help you decide which leads are high-quality for passing onto the sales team.

Alternatively, you may use different types of call tracking to set up unique phone numbers for campaign channels to find lead sources. You can also create one for marketing purposes that will allow your leads to reach you.

There are different kinds of software that you can use, such as CRM platforms and lead generation management.

While these software programs are similar in some ways, as they both have an element of managing leads, they have unique capabilities that can complement each other.

Finally, it's important to remember that no single approach works for every business, and experimentation and customization may be necessary to find the right strategy for your specific needs.

With the right tools and a well-executed plan, you can efficiently track and increase your chances of converting leads into satisfied customers and driving your business growth.

Andy Thompson

Andy Thompson has been a freelance writer for a long while. She is a senior SEO and content marketing analyst at Digiexe, a digital marketing agency specializing in content and data-driven SEO. She has more than seven years of experience in digital marketing & affiliate marketing too. She likes sharing her knowledge in a wide range of domains ranging from ecommerce, startups, social media marketing, making money online, affiliate marketing to human capital management, and much more. She has been writing for several authoritative SEO, Make Money Online & digital marketing blogs like: ImageStation, & Newsmartwave