5 Call Tracking Mistakes That Most Companies Make (And How to Avoid Them)

Many of our marketing customers have never used a call tracking solution before. For them, call tracking opens a rich new world of closed-loop reporting, finally enabling them to make smarter ad investments and take credit for ROI closed over the telephone.

But for other customers, Revenue.io is not their first rodeo. They’ve come to us after having implemented other call tracking solutions. They had expected game-changing results and were disappointed. Intelligent call tracking offers fantastic ROI, but only with the right implementation.

If you’ve used call tracking to middling results, or if you are considering investing in a call tracking system, here are 5 of the biggest pitfalls that we’ve seen companies run into while implementing a call tracking solution. By avoiding these 5 mistakes, you can maximize the ROI of your call tracking investment.

Mistake 1: Using Call Volume as Your Primary Metric

This is the number one mistake  most companies make when using call tracking! Marketers think, “If a campaign is driving a lot of calls, it must be working, right?” Wrong! A campaign that inspires a flood of unqualified leads to call your sales team is doing nothing except clogging up your sales funnel. Sure, track call volume. But also track which marketing efforts drive the best calls (those that turn into opportunities and, more importantly, revenue). The best way to do this is with a call tracking solution that syncs with your CRM, where your sales data already lives.

Mistake 2: Adopting a Call Tracking Solution with a Flimsy CRM Integration

Many call tracking solutions offer some degree of CRM integration. We’ve spoken to many customers who invested in one of our competitors’ solutions because it purported to integrate with Salesforce. Several spent thousands of dollars working with Salesforce consultants to get a solution to work with Salesforce at all, only to find that the integration was, at best, flimsy. Many products that claim to work with Salesforce actually require manual data uploading and data massaging, while offering no real-time visibility into which calls are driving ROI. Revenue.io, on the other hand, was created by marketers who saw a clear need for a solution that effortlessly syncs with Salesforce. From day one, our goal was always to build a tool that syncs with Salesforce right out of the box.

Mistake 3: Failing to Automatically Log Inbound Calls in a CRM

Many companies spend heavily on call tracking software only to let valuable phone leads slip through the cracks. Is your company selling over the phone? If so, you should make sure that every call from every marketing effort is automatically logged in your CRM. Even diligent inside sales reps won’t log every call if they have to do it manually. By logging calls in your CRM, you can always prove which efforts are driving the calls that pay the bills.

Mistake 4: Not Using Call Tracking Calls to Intelligently Route Calls

Call tracking data can not only help marketers make smarter investments, it can also be leveraged by companies to improve inbound call conversion rates. Using call tracking enables marketers to predict buyers’ intent and then route them to the perfect sales rep. For example, say your company sells cloud hosting and storage packages. If a prospect calls after clicking a Google ad for “cloud app hosting” marketers can dramatically increase close rates by routing that call to a sales rep that’s skilled in selling app hosting packages.

Mistake 5: Not Leveraging Call Tracking Data to Power Smarter Calls

Since call tracking data is a powerful signal of a buyer’s intent, that data should be shared with reps in real time. Before a rep even picks up the phone to answer a call, they can know who’s calling and what to sell. Revenue.io goes even further than that. Many of our customers use Revenue.io to trigger a screen pop that reveals a wealth of conextual data including call scripts, social media feeds, prior communication data from Salesforce and more.