New to Phone Leads, How to Handle?

[animalstyle]

Currently I send web traffic and leads to a client. The visitors to my site would often prefer a phone call to purchase and I know the conversion rates of those calls would be much better than web traffic/web leads.

I've been investigating some solutions and stumbled across quite a few, and some that even integrate into Salesforce (which would be useful in my case). Found many solutions, most look much too full featured (and expensive) for my needs - ie: http://www.dialogtech.com/

It seems like tracking the number of calls, time on the phone wouldn't be too tough. Without listening to every call, how can you track conversions? How do you set pricing for these leads if you don't have conversion data? Some sort of $/minute rate or something?

Just digging in to all this as phone leads are totally new territory for me. Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Ryuzaki]

I use http://www.invoca.com dashboard, but it's set up and paid for by the affiliate network I'm using. My guess is it's probably expensive.

And yeah, they have someone who's job is to listen to every call.

I can't think of what the technology is called, but depending on the scale of your campaign you'd first filter calls by region or anything else like "Press 1 if you have health insurance." You'll pre-qualify and route calls around to different call centers that can best cater to and convert each call.

Otherwise, I would certainly set up something based on the time spent on the phone. I'm making stuff up but something like:

• 0-29 seconds = $0
• > 30 seconds = $25
• > 2.5 minutes = $50
• > 30 minutes = $200

Totally depends on your industry. But you definitely don't want to try to charge someone for every call because a lot of people call and immediately hang up. Also, you don't want that $0 window too large or you'll have the call center or client getting their information as fast as possible and hanging up and calling them back to bypass your tracking.

What this time structure does is prove a lead is somewhat hot, or hotter, or blazing. You get paid on quality of lead, not based on whether or not the dingbat on the phone can close it.

I'd definitely want to know:

• Where in the region the call originated
• The number of the phone being used
• How long they stayed on the line
• The ability to listen to the calls

I think all of that would be included in any kind of package you pay for. Whether there's affordable software for smaller operations versus giant agencies, I don't know.

 

[animalstyle]

Thanks @Ryuzaki, very helpful stuff and pretty much along the lines of what I was thinking price wise. Good to see some confirmation that I was on the right track there.

Pretty wild to hear that as a middle man they have someone listening to every call, especially if the caller is providing credit card info over the phone - sounds like some wild PCI compliance complexities to me. (won't ask)

Thanks for the knowledge.