If you have a B2B sales team, every sales and marketing activity is leading up to a pivotal moment – a phone call. Your SDRs spend hours trying to connect with viable prospects and marketers expend countless resources just to get customers to call. So the last thing you want is to lose visibility into the results of those vital calls.
By tracking call metrics, you can know—in real time—the outcome of all your reps’ calls. You can also discover some powerful ways to help your reps improve. While there are a lot of important call metrics that inside sales teams should be tracking, this post will focus on three call metrics that are less known.
Are your reps losing out on valuable phone leads? The best way to find out is by tracking reps’ rate of abandoned calls. A call abandonment rate refers to the percentage of inbound callers that hang up before a rep can answer a call. This is crucial to track because inbound phone leads are often the most valuable leads of all. They’re highly engaged, they’ve usually researched your solution and are ready to have a serious sales conversation. After all, think of the last time you called a business. You probably had a good reason.
Don’t leave these high value leads hanging. If a call abandonment rate is high, it can indicate that you need to hire more reps to cover the phones. It can also indicate that calls are being routed to the wrong place, or that reps are simply failing to answer the phone. Try to make your abandonment rate as close to 0% as possible.
What is the average length of time that reps are spending on connected calls? This metric is important because too many short calls can be an early warning sign that a rep needs guidance. If a rep consistently fails to keep prospects on the phone for longer than two minutes (the point at which many sales teams deem “a conversation”), then you may need to listen to that rep’s messaging. By drilling into call recordings you can try to gauge why prospects aren’t staying on calls. Are the leads unqualified, or is that rep failing to engage effectively?
“Call disposition” is a term that stems from call centers referring to the outcome of a call. Some common call dispositions might include busy, no answer, hang-up or appointment set. By tracking these call outcomes in your CRM, you can view a report that gives a bird’s-eye-view of a rep’s call outcomes. This can be valuable because if there is a disproportionate amount of certain call outcomes, it can signal a red flag. As an example, if Marketing is providing Sales with a high number of disconnected numbers, then it could mean that there’s a problem with the lead source.
One way that Revenue.io helps sales teams is by enabling reps to log call dispositions in Salesforce with one click. Our tool even gives reps a gentle reminder when they forget to log dispositions. This not only saves reps time, but ensures that reps log every call outcome.
These call metrics are really only scratching the surface. For an in-depth look at the most important sales metrics that top sales teams are tracking.