Light Up Your Lead Intelligence With Call Data

Warren Buffett once said, “A market downturn doesn’t bother us. It is an opportunity to increase our ownership of great companies with great management at good prices.” While Mr. Buffett was referring to investing in stock, this same sentiment applies to investing in marketing. For example, as marketers emerged from Covid-19 lockdowns, those who took a longer-term view and invested in marketing thrived—they gained an outsized share of voice at much lower costs. The key to investing confidently is finding ways to minimize risk. During the pandemic, I was vp of the U.S. SME commercial business within the global commercial services marketing team at American Express. We set out with a clear mission: “Invest with no regrets.” Instead of casting a wide net, we used data and analytics to identify prospects who looked like our best customers. We then invested proportionally to their potential value. There was no wasted spend. Back then, we had access to teams of people with deep data sets. Today, you can access similar actionable insights with sophisticated marketing tools. Depending on your ROI threshold, this is an excellent practice for any economy, but it’s increasingly essential when the climate is uncertain—when the cost of being wrong is elevated. The right lead intelligence and insights give businesses of all sizes the confidence to invest when others pull back. The C-Suite Is Finally Embracing Account-Based Marketing. Now What? Broadly defined, lead intelligence is information about potential customers that reveals insights into their behavior, motivations and interests to improve marketing, sales and customer experiences. Of course, the best business decisions—and ultimately, the greatest return on investment—require the best intelligence: accurate, timely and relevant. Marketing in the dark You may know when a lead visits your website, clicks an ad or downloads content. But do you know when an online search, social ad, billboard or mailer inspires them to pick up the phone and call or text? For too many businesses, call and text data is the most significant gap in their lead intelligence. The good news is it’s one of the easiest to fill. Even better: If your business receives high volumes of phone calls, you’re probably sitting on a treasure trove of business-building insights. The key to unlocking this wealth of information is call tracking, which illuminates how individual leads interact with the ads (both print and digital), keywords and campaigns that make your business’ phones ring. When you connect this source data to Google Analytics, Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising, you’ll see every step a buyer makes in their journey—each call and click side by side along their path to purchase. Once you know which marketing efforts make your phones ring, how do you optimize every lead? After all, they aren’t cheap. At CallRail, we’ve been using AI-powered chat to surface actionable insights from customer calls and texts since 2016. Fast, accurate and automatic, AI is better than humans at optimizing marketing campaigns, qualifying leads and revealing sales coaching and training opportunities. It frees managers to motivate and analyze, marketers to market and salespeople to sell. Turning on the lights You can learn a lot about customers and prospects once you have complete, multichannel and AI-powered lead intelligence. Here are some ways your business can illuminate insights. Reinvest in what’s working, reallocate what’s not. With call tracking, there’s no more guesswork about which offline tactics work. For example, if you’re receiving a high volume of calls from a truck wrap, you may consider turning the rest of your fleet into moving billboards. And if you find you’re spending money on certain keywords that aren’t driving leads, you could divert the spend to a tactic with proven ROI. Learn from lead and customer texts, chats and forms. In addition to calls, you can map texts, chats and website form fills to each buyer’s journey. You can also use AI to listen for words and phrases like “manager” and “poor service” to zero in on issues that might lead to churn. Fine-tune sales and marketing strategies with real-time AI. Use conversation insights surfaced by AI to adapt new sales and marketing strategies on the fly. For example, a home services company bidding heavily on “repair” keywords might notice more customers asking for “remodeling” and rethink some of their search spend. Or a bankruptcy law firm might notice an uptick and conversations about taxes, suggesting a potential new specialty. Leave no lead behind. Once you’ve used lead intelligence to optimize your advertising strategies and spend, you need to make sure your team’s ready to convert leads to customers. When you use AI to automatically qualify callers, opportunities won’t slip between the cracks. Getting started is easy: Just identify criteria that signal leads to your sales organization. Form fills can trigger notifications to frontline teams so they give hot leads the attention they deserve. And because not all leads are created equal, you can use AI to prioritize and tag your highest value opportunities. What Is the ‘Informed Call’? Illuminating insights You can’t increase your investment in growth if you’re marketing in the dark. With advances in AI and call tracking technology, it’s easier than ever to fill gaps in your lead intelligence so you make better business decisions. With all the lights on, you can reinvest in what's working, learn from customer conversations and convert more leads into better customers.