Learn More About Maximizing Your Sales

CallerReady Owner and CEO, Joe Charlson, explains how to maximize your sales with Call Marketing Automation at the Contact.io conference in San Francisco.

Video Transcription

Jay : The three out of four handshakes – its a good conversion rate.  That was fantastic. There was…like the brutal honesty without being too depressing, but also knowing that as an industry this has always been one that has always been really good at focusing on where the actual profit comes from.  It looks like, look at that, almost no transition needed, Joe is ready to go.  So, Joe I will let you go.

Joe : Thanks Jay.  Hello, my name is Joe Charlson.  I am the CEO and founder of CallerReady.  CallerReady is the performance call marketing platform.  I’m going to start with a little story. Many moons ago when I was a student, 18 years old, in my first class.  I sat down, it was biology.  There was a little old man who was kind of idling up to the board and if you can believe it, it was a chalkboard. He started writing down, ‘Hello, my name is Dr. Woggy, this is Biology.’  It was a little hard to read, but he wrote: ‘Biology is the study of life. Life is one god damn thing after another.’  So today is not that day.  Today is a fresh new day and I am also going to thank Jay, Michele, and Ty for putting this together.  I am very excited about the evolution of the space and it is great that we have a forum to get together, network, and share ideas.  So today is not like every other day, this is a very good day.  The topic here is Maximizing Sales with Call Marketing Automation.  I’ve been doing call technology for the past six years.  Before that I was with one of the large for profit companies, generating leads and trying to turn them into phone calls.  The one thing I’m missing is a clicker for my slides, here it is. I’m color blind so the green button is that one.

So why do we generate leads?  Heard it a couple of times, but it is not really a rhetorical question.  Any show of hands why?  I am not really talking about the Nikes or the Best Buy’s who are generating leads to build a contact list for emailing.  Why do we generate leads?  Anybody?

Speaker 3 : To sell

Joe : To sell, okay you guys got it. But we need to get them on the phone largely, right?  Everybody in this audience is generating leads to get them on the phone, but getting them on the phone is not enough.  We got to ring the register, right?  We have to connect them to the right agent who can help them in their buying decision. Those are the two conversion processes, particularly in a one call closed sell.  Who is this guy?  Alexander Graham Bell, already referenced once, this is not Frank Zappa. What is he doing?  He is speaking into his invention in 1876. Alexander Graham Bell spoke to the words to his assistant Watson: “Watson come here!  I want to see you!” I might not be able to navigate down to here.  I actually had his voice, but I would need a mouse to probably get down to it.

Alexander Bell’s voice: (can’t decipher 03:22)

Joe : So what he said was, “Hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell,” the Smithsonian researchers were able to take off cardboard and wax recording and get that so we can actually hear what he said.  Call Marketing Dashboard v1, a little switchboard, right?  It is a lot different than that today.  Today, state of the art call marketing dashboards have connection rates, qualification rates, they allow you to monitor the calls, export data to your CRM, see trends, Geographic spreads.  We have come quite a long way. They allow you to see in this case, red group, yellow/green, green buyers, how much they bought today, qualified call percentages.  I am going back to the beginning, an early call center operator, she is not that confident, did it work?  You can see her little horn that she speaks into with a microphone.  Technology advances, more cables and then you see around the 1920’s, more of what looks like a call center operation with actual call center managers.  Today we have headsets, PC’s, all the benefit of the transistors.  So somebody on the computer, on their laptop, on the phone and speaking to an agent.  So we have evolved from people making connections through switchboards to modern call marketing systems where the connections are brokered by sophisticated software running in the cloud.  Seems like a small step, it’s been a 130 odd years, but it is amazing what we can do today.  So to set the stage on the moving the needle, what is call marketing automation?

Call Marketing Automation
I wanted to define what’s involved in that term.  So it’s the use of technology to connect two parties on the phone.  Different aspects of it are lead-to-call automation – to taking a form and turning it into a phone call, not with humans, but with technology: pre-recorded messages, texts and email.  Call engagement widgets, call me now, talk now, schedule a call, call tracking, campaign/source level tracking, and dynamic phone number insertion and dynamic call distribution.  Very near and dear to my heart and one of the key areas of innovation for CallerReady company, which we will talk a little bit more about.  Another fundamental aspect of call marketing automation is what to do when the expected buyer or agent is not available. That’s overflow or when they plan not to be there afterhours because we live in a 24/7 on demand economy, people want to talk to people 24 hours a day. The other key piece is the monetization platform, so taking of all those bits and pieces of automation and calls, supplier orders to sell calls, tracking it all, allowing the marketplace to operate efficiently.  So that is call marketing automation.

Now we are going to shift in, how do we move the needle with call marketing automation on your sales process?  I’m going to go back to the beginning.  What are the two biggest points of failure in a call campaign?  Anybody want to share?  Nobody knows what the two biggest points. Well, I can’t get the person on the phone in the first place.  I’ve got a lead and I can’t contact them.  The second point is, once I’ve got the lead on the phone, I can’t get them connected to the right buyer/agent.  So it is important to understand those two points to understand how you move the dial on these campaigns.  So I am going to promote a panel tomorrow, that’s going into more depth on lead-to-call automation case studies.  We have May Chan from NationStar. She is going to talk about replacing a human-based outbound call center process with technology.  Jeff Fisher is going to talk about taking email campaigns and driving them into pay-per-call.  Clelland Green from Benepath is going to talk about how you can use dynamic call distribution API with an existing set of buyers that you may manage for selling leads or calls and how to efficiently run competitive call distribution in the cloud in real time.  So I would encourage you if you are interested to come to that.
Lead To Call Automation

Lead-to-call automation – there are a lot of words on here, but what this is, it is just a draft flow of what you have to go through to understand and control the automatic process.  Much the same steps as if you were running a call center or a sales floor, you have a CRM and all the contact points.  So what you see on here is, where are we going to send the SMS?  How many call attempts are we going to make?  Call attempts 1-7 in this case and then we have after-hours of handling on the screen.  So you have to define that and you have to define the messaging for that given campaign, but once you’ve got it locked and loaded, it is technology and it just works all the time. So, a little bit of data, everybody likes to look at data.  This is an example for one vertical pay-per-call, billable call yield across the different call counts.  It goes from zero out to fifteen call attempts.  So what is call attempt zero?  That is inbound calls that are happening as part of the campaign as well as responding to SMS text.  So of the total yield, about 24% was coming in without making any outbound calls.  Call attempt one, very important if you’ve been to LeadsCon or you are familiar with the research about calling fast.  That call attempt one you are getting maximum yield, over 30% and it kind of has a half-life trailing off.  This next slide is kind of the same data, just showing it the opposite way of cumulative build by call attempt.
Phone Number Integration

One of the key strategies that I want to impart to you all from my experience is, integrating the phone number with the form.  You will see different research out there, like from Unbounce and others around who do landing page optimization, that if you ask for a phone number it is going to drive your yield way down.  Well, ok, but if you are trying to get them on the phone, you need a phone number.  This phone number is putting a phone number on the actual landing page to call into.  Some interesting notes about this –  if you try and run just a pure pay-per-call with just a phone number in certain verticals, you might not get a good yield, you might think that oh this isn’t going to work.  By actually putting a form on it, you drive the inbound call rate significantly higher.  People see the form, they think, I’ve got one/two options, I’d rather call.  So you drive the inbound call rate, plus you catch all that data and with that call automation you can get huge increase in your overall lead and call volume there. Very counterintuitive, right?  But important nonetheless.

Call Tracking
Two main methods exist for call tracking – click level and source level.  Click level, what that means is, say somebody comes in off Google search, comes through with a Google click ID, sees a unique phone number, either fills out the form or calls in.   Either way the click ID stays with them and then when they turn into a conversion for your sales process or if you are selling pay per call, then call tracking can send that information back to Google Adwords and say: bing a sale occurred.  Very cool technology.  Source level, many people in this room are probably more familiar with.  It is attributing a source like Facebook, landing page A and putting a specific number that everybody calls into.

Dynamic Call Distribution

Okay, so first, wisdom is phone number plus form works better.  We’ve got the lead on the phone, now what?  Should we connect the lead to the next hungriest agent or buyer?  Who thinks that is a good idea?  It makes sense, it is fair.  If I’ve got five agents or five buyers for round robin across them, is that what we should do with the next call?  Can I see a show of hands, who thinks we should send that call to the person who has been waiting the longest to receive the call?  Nobody thinks that.  I don’t think that, but I think we should offer it to them.  But we shouldn’t just offer it to them, why?  This gets into the friction of why we can’t get stuff connected.  The call center gave the marketer the wrong number and no one tested it, the marketer input the number correctly and didn’t test it, it was Martin Luther King day and nobody told you that they are not taking calls on Martin Luther King Day, the agent is on a smoke break, didn’t click out of their system so the system thinks that they are ready for a call and they are out smoking., they have a sick cat, they have a snow day, phone system trouble, car trouble, they are on the other line with their Boo.  We didn’t do song here, “50 ways to drop a call.”  There is a lot of friction in the pipe, so I want to help you to stop losing calls and the absolute best way to stop dropping calls is to put buyers in competition for the call.  Agents or buyers, I use them synonymously because they are very similar processes, but putting them in competition to receive the call.  The second most important way is making sure your intended recipient is not there, not able to take the call, establishing solid overflow and after-hours processes.

So dynamically distribution with speed to press one competition, what is this?  That was my fair city of Pittsburgh, shout outs to the city.  What is dynamic call distribution?  It is using data and information from the lead record to select which group of buyer agents to send that call to.  What is a speed to press one competition?  It is easier to say than speed to press any key, but the one is not important, it is simply a response from the buyer or agent that they are there and they are ready to take the call.  That is why my companies name is CallerReady, it was all about the lead, are you ready?  The agent, are you ready?  Then broker the phone call.  So what this is, is taking a list of matching, prioritized agents or buyers, offering them the call in a handicapped, but still partially overlapping manner.  So what does that mean?  Handicap them on the price they are willing to pay, their sell through rate, their conversion rate, their skill set, any set of data and then run a call competition.  Handicapping by, hey I’ve got a ranked list I can call one through one by one, but by the time I get to the third person, the lead has hung up the line on the call.  So the first agent or buyer in that competition to press a key wins that competition, the call is awarded and everybody is hung up on, the system tracks.  Speed to press one competition is the number one-way of improving your sell through rate.  Here is an example of what one of our clients was able to do with the daisy chain, round robin process, got a 65% human-to-human connection rate.  By putting into place competition, they were able to take that up to 98%.  Over a 50% lift in connection rate.  It is astounding, but it makes sense, right?  Because if I only had one place to go with the call, if I had a second possible place, I have doubled my odds for a successful call.  If I had a third buyer into it, I have tripled my odds.  If I had ten buyers, I have ten times the odds of making that call happen fast and effectively and getting that happy consumer.  Because faster connections we all know, equals a happier consumer.  You know you are not waiting on hold, the call is brokered quickly, as we just saw the connection and billable rates dramatically improved, we have less arguments over the abandoned calls between marketers and advertisers or sales managers.  Buyers are only paying if they win the call.  So there is a whole lot less friction as you are managing these campaigns and it also, this is very important, if you are running a broadcast, TV or the fed increases rates, you have all these exhausting factors that lead to spiky call demand by having more potential routes for those calls, you can mitigate the effects of spiky demand.

After Hours and Overflow

So, multi-buyer call options or competitive call distribution, the other really important piece is that no matter how good that is, you still need to have after hours and over-flow in place.  With whatever you are using, you need to make sure you have thought through that.  Examples: configuring back up calls centers, buyers of last resort, if you are doing pay-per-call and you are able to sell a given lead or call for $20, for the last 60 seconds, somebody else is saying, ‘I will give you $6.’  Put them in the buyer of last resort position, you can still make sure you have the most effective yield.  Tiered hunk groups, intelligent abandonment, this used to be only available on those super high-end systems that cost a quarter of a million dollars a year or Genesis or things like that, but what this is using technology to come on the line and say, it is taking a little bit longer to get your agent, rather than have you wait on hold, you can hang up now, maintain your place in queue and we will call you back and then put the process in place to call them when their agent is available or have voice call them.  So we have come a long way from when the telephone was invented.  The pace of innovation is very strong right now.   I am excited for you to see the next session as well, where we are going to see some innovators.

The key things we have talked about to recap are: to drive your sales in pay-per-call or just call programs for advertisers, don’t limit it to just a phone number, don’t limit it to just a form, they actually work better together.  I know that is a strange concept for those who are used to advertising phone numbers or lead generators who are just used to the economic around a lead form, but the yield is better with two options.  Using real time competitive call competitions to distribute calls.  There is no better way when buyers compete, everybody wins.  Ensuring you configure overflow and afterhours.  By doing those three things, I guarantee you that your yield will increase.  I’ve got just a couple of seconds left, I appreciated your attention.   Does anybody have any questions about what we have talked about that I might be able to address?  No questions, okay.  Oh, we got one.

Speaker 4 : What was the lift that you are (cant decipher 23:03)

Joe : The question was, what was the lift from being a phone number on a form?  Well, basically going from this vertical does not work, we can’t make the yield work, we have tested it, the phone number doesn’t work to, oh my god we have a business here.  So no specific number there, but I would encourage you to repeat the test in your vertical, it is real simple to do with landing pages, but you do need of course technology to track a vertical because it is a different process.  Okay, well thank you all for your attention, I really appreciate it.  Come see us at the networking event in the exhibition, I would be happy to talk to you about…