The most simple way your business can increase sales is removing the 1 hole that plagues about 90% of B2B/B2C sales funnels.
I just called an insurance company to get a quote for new service. I went through about 30 seconds of BS on their IVR and guess what I did?
I hung up.
AAA Texas just lost by business because of how they treated me with their answering machine and this is a common challenge for sales & marketing departments. The most common reason companies have poor sales is because of the programming on the IVR (integrated Voice Response) and they have no clue. Why do they have no clue? Bbecause very few companies measures their call analytics to know where the drop offs occur. They don’t track phone calls, talk times or listen/transcribe call recordings.
If the majority of your phone calls are under 1 minute – you might have a hole in your phone sales funnel. To increase sales, just remove the IVR. Or setup a dedicated sales line and setup call tracking tools to measure this type of sales analytics.
Most of the time its caused by your companies”answering machine” . You are literally losing sales and running through shit this month because you allowed IT to program a clueless IVR on your customer acquisition and customer communication lines. What would you do if you were the customer – endure the crap or abandon and find a more customer friendly insurance company? If you are generating calls from online marketing like Google AdWords, Facebook, Bing, Youtube, you need to invest in dynamic phone call tracking and have it directly integrated with your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. You need to task you marketing and sales managers to analyze every aspect of your funnel and look for metrics like talk time, length of calls, time when abandonment occurs. You also need to track phone call sales, conversion rates and listen to calls to better understand the Voice of Your Customer.
If you want more sales from phone leads, you need to setup a sales funnel that can convert the callers into dollars. To do that, these simple graphs help you figure out when you are setup and running great, or whey you have massive holes in your funnel.
If it is such a “pain-in-the-ass” in the first 30 seconds, what is it going to be like in the long run? What was even more crazy is the number that I called was on a landing page that AAA had setup for their AdWords account and was specific to new customer accounts. Yet the prompts were for existing customers to file claims and pay bill and has nothing to do with a new customer quote. And I guarantee some bean counter thought the company would save money by using a machine to answer calls instead of answering calls with live sales agents. The phone auto-attendant programming was setup so annoying in the first 30 seconds I decided to hang up and not do business with that insurance company. Guess what? You are causing yourself less sales by not analyzing your phone call metrics and agent analytics. Building a better sales funnel and growing your company requires best in class phone tracking and CRM software.
