Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Kevin Dieny: Hello. Welcome to the Close The Loop podcast. Today, we are joined by a special guest to talk about the cost of missing one call in your business. Today’s guest is Tim Tran. He is the sales engineer at CallSource. So we’re very familiar with each other. He works on and provides oversight for strategic projects here at CallSource and acts as an internal consultant for various aspects of the business. He is passionate about finding or providing solutions for external and internal clients, especially internal. Heh, Tim has two kids and he loves being able to spend time with his family. And when he has the time, he loves to train for endurance and obstacle events, which is pretty cool.

[00:00:41] Kevin Dieny: So welcome, Tim.

[00:00:42] Tim Tran: Thank you.

[00:00:43] Kevin Dieny: And of course we have our illustrious guests. We are joined by Matt Widmyer.

[00:00:48] Matt Widmyer: Hey everybody.

[00:00:49] Kevin Dieny: And Ronn burner.

[00:00:51] Ronn Burner: Hey gang. Happy to be here and see you again Tim.

[00:00:54] Tim Tran: Good to see you too, man.

[00:00:55] Kevin Dieny: So today’s topic of, what’s the cost of missing one call in your business? There’s a lot that goes into a phone call.

[00:01:02] Kevin Dieny: There’s a lot that goes into paying to generate one phone call on the marketing side. There’s a lot that happens on the technological operational side. Maybe you’re missing calls, you don’t even realize it, you don’t even have a chance to recover them.

[00:01:15] Kevin Dieny: And then there’s the sales side, which is, missing a call because it’s mishandled, missing a call because you fumbled it, missing a call because you’re away from your desk. There’s a lot of that. And then finally, there’s a little, part of that journey that’s not as much paid attention to, which is the follow-up. What do you do when you do find the calls that you have missed – what do you do with them?

[00:01:36] Kevin Dieny: That’s what we’re going to be talking about today. So to throw it over to you, Tim, the question. Why is it so difficult for businesses to respond to every single call effectively and efficiently? Well, what’s the big gap there?

[00:01:51] Tim Tran: I think it’s a pretty easy question. I think the biggest thing is that they’re already handling and providing great customer service to all their, people that have called in.

[00:02:00] Tim Tran: And so sometimes it takes a lot of time and you can’t get to everyone and there’s solutions and action plans that you can take, to mitigate that. But I, in my, experience, I think it’s because they’re already helping customers and marketing is already doing their job and getting more customers to call in.

[00:02:16] Kevin Dieny: Yeah. So there’s limited staff at most businesses. They don’t have unlimited, there’s a limited training, maybe limited resources. We’ve got limited budgets. So all these things are constraining the business, and all it really cares about is we just want to talk to the ones that want to buy from us, or want to get service from us, or want to add to our bottom line.

[00:02:37] Kevin Dieny: Right. So, that’s not exactly all the amount of callers that are coming in. Matt, did you want to add a little bit in, on the other types of callers that a lot of times businesses are getting besides those wonderful juicy prospects?

[00:02:52] Matt Widmyer: Yeah. I mean, there’s, we we get a lot of those actually, and not as many as before, but yeah, not every call that calls through is a lead, but when it is a lead, you want to make sure you get to it.

[00:03:03] Matt Widmyer: Every once in a while we have a wrong number, phone call, a couple of prank calls here and there that it happens. Every once in a while you have somebody who may be, might have misunderstanding of what it is that we do. So they’re just calling for a little bit more information.

[00:03:15] Matt Widmyer: But for the most part, a lot of the calls we get are prospects.

[00:03:19] Kevin Dieny: So that must be my wonderful marketing….

[00:03:23] Matt Widmyer: Hasn’t always been that way.

[00:03:26] Kevin Dieny: Every business is going to have some good and some bad. Right? So, Ronn, do you want to comment on maybe some of the ways a business can make use of the good and the bad with maybe some marketing ideas or business ideas or anything on how to capture more or do something with those callers in those two buckets?

[00:03:46] Ronn Burner: Yeah. It’s interesting point that Tim brought up when it comes to different types of calls. Because of course my mind immediately goes to some form of lead generation, some form of sales when the truth is there’s other reasons people call. So if they already are current customers and they are calling because they need support, for something that, that something went wrong or something is not… they just need a better understanding of it.

[00:04:07] Ronn Burner: So there’s those sorts of calls that come in, which is a really good point and really interesting. Cause I, my head immediately goes to lead generation and calls. It’s an opportunity. And once again, as a marketing leader, the effort that goes into getting that call is pretty vast as we all know.

[00:04:25] Ronn Burner: And when we miss it, it’s an opportunity that’s missed and it’s, and it’s not just, in my mind, the singular call itself. It’s the, it’s the negative effect it has on the reputation. And that is. What really from a marketing perspective, what we want to avoid, because we want repeat customers. And if we can’t, if our first impression to them is call somebody else because we’re too busy, you know, that can be a problem.

[00:04:50] Ronn Burner: That being said, it is pretty unrealistic to have 100% live person answering a call. Yeah. That sort of coverage, it’s pretty unrealistic for anybody. So when you do miss the calls, first of all minimize it, but how do you make amends for it? Because you’re already starting down, in a negative light.

[00:05:10] Tim Tran: Right, right because to your point, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of, impressions that are left behind, right? You guys spent all the money to get the phones, to ring someone doesn’t pick up. And now it’s become a thing. Like every time I call this business, they don’t pick up. The impression that you leave behind on these people are like, Hey, I have a cell phone.

[00:05:25] Tim Tran: I’m just going to scroll and find. Competitor, I’m going to find someone else to help me with this. I think quick action. If you know you missed a call, maybe have someone dedicated to returning those calls quickly. So that person isn’t scrolling to find the next person to help them.

[00:05:43] Kevin Dieny: You make a good point, Ronn and Tim there about the parts of a call that could be missed.

[00:05:50] Kevin Dieny: Also the intent of the caller is a big deal, right? A caller who’s not intending to do anything. Maybe like Matt said a crank caller, someone accidentally dials. There’s a group of that in every business’ calls no matter what they do, right. If you’re going to be out there in the market, generating leads, generating calls, prospects, interested patients, anything like that.

[00:06:10] Kevin Dieny: You’re going to get some good with some bad. I think that’s inevitable. So Tim, in terms of how we classify it, we use terms like bookable before we classify something as a prospect and the bookable leg is okay, did it even reach a person, right? Did it go to a voicemail? What happened? So could you maybe share a little bit about that first part of a call that could lead to dropping or missing calls completely before it even reaches a person or even reaches a point where they’re having a good conversation?

[00:06:43] Kevin Dieny: I know one of them is getting lost in an IVR. Can you explain some of those like pre person, ways of losing phone calls?

[00:06:49] Tim Tran: Yeah. Like you said, so when calling in and getting lost in an IVR tree, I would actually, like, I don’t want to talk to a robot. I just want to talk to someone right now and they’re gonna hit zero or they’re just going to hang up.

[00:06:59] Tim Tran: Right. There’s one way, the other way is they call and because the business didn’t set up voicemail, I mean, it’s a double-edged sword, right? People don’t like leaving voicemails. People don’t like responding to voicemails that much. Instead of connecting to someone, they’ll just wait and wait and wait and wait for it to ring, to connect someone and not hang up.

[00:07:17] Tim Tran: Those we considered just missed calls. We do have something in our metrics called abandoned and that is just, so when they called, but didn’t ring more than twice. Most likely those people will call back. They just probably thought they, the dialed the wrong number and hung up and rechecked the number to make sure, they dialed the right number and they’ll usually call back.

[00:07:33] Tim Tran: There’s also the busy, right? So if they reach your business and it gets a busy signal, there’s no way to really follow back up with them. If you don’t have a process in place to capture that busy signal.

[00:07:44] Kevin Dieny: Yeah. Those are really interesting. Each of those, because if let’s say any of those is happening in abundance. As the marketer, I would be like, what kind of leads am I generating if everyone’s abandoning, you know what I mean? If they’re constantly calling ringing once and hanging up, it’d be a hard thing to assess.

[00:08:00] Kevin Dieny: What am I marketing is triggering this weird behavior? Is it some easy to click call number that they realize, oops, I didn’t mean to call, like what, what’s the cause? And that’s difficult to unravel.

[00:08:09] Kevin Dieny: Matt though, I wanted to ask you for the voicemails, your team gets. Or for businesses that do have voicemails that they are getting, or maybe have the same data that we’re providing, like here’s the abandoned calls.

[00:08:21] Kevin Dieny: Here’s the busy calls. Here’s those lost in IVR, whatever. How do you think a business should approach calling those people back when you haven’t actually had that first conversation yet?

[00:08:32] Matt Widmyer: Yeah. So we have a process.

[00:08:34] Matt Widmyer: Periodically throughout the day, we’re clearing the voicemails throughout there. We don’t get a lot of voicemails because the coverage is actually really good with my team. Once we consolidated the inbound lead team with the outbound team. The coverage has never been better.

[00:08:48] Matt Widmyer: And it’s simultaneously ringing to everybody’s phone at the same time. One of them will get it usually. But if, you know, we’ve all gone home for the day or something happens overnight. That’s top priority because those are people knocking on our door.

[00:09:02] Matt Widmyer: We would put those at a higher priority than going out and knocking on somebody else’s door. So we address those often and we address them with urgency.

[00:09:12] Kevin Dieny: So the next one question I have for is for you, Ronn, and it might sound like a simple question, but it’s a little bit loaded.

[00:09:18] Kevin Dieny: All right. So, what is so important? What is the value of a single phone call?

[00:09:25] Ronn Burner: Honestly, it’s not that loaded because, for simple terms that any organization can do is you take your average deal size, any conversion that happens. You take that average size, multiply it by the number of missed calls you have. And yes, you’re not closing a hundred percent of those calls us.

[00:09:42] Ronn Burner: So if you want to take that a step further then of the calls that you are taking, what percentage of those are you closing? And right there, it really answers. A few questions. The question and answers is, are we understaffed? If that number is big enough to justify the staffing, then you do so certainly.

[00:09:59] Ronn Burner: And then there’s other roles that, that person can do that can contribute to the team. But this is where the budgeting and the deciding what the most important thing for the business is. Because obviously, reputation and sales, we talk about revenue in terms of an actual sales that takes place, but it is much larger than that where it is your reputation.

[00:10:16] Ronn Burner: Because guess what? When I have a good experience with any organization, we all have different cell services. We all have different dentists. We all have different, theme parks. We go to whatever it is when you have a good customer service experience or a good sales experience. I’m now telling my friends whether it was good or bad, I’m bringing it up.

[00:10:33] Ronn Burner: I can quick, like Tim said on the cell phone earlier, right. He can quickly go to another business. You know what else you can do quickly. You could quickly pull up that business and have a review. And people don’t typically like to go write grande reviews about how wonderful their experience is they want to go and talk about how negative it was because they’re on fire in that moment.

[00:10:53] Ronn Burner: For simple math, yeah. Take that average deal size multiply, by the number of missed calls you have, and you really quickly start to see a number that actually is meaningful to your KPIs, to the organization’s overhead, to commission. It adds up.

[00:11:08] Tim Tran: That’s right. We used to do that, when we were doing finance reports. So we would tell, hey, look, we analyze your calls for a month. Right? You missed X amount of calls. Your closing percentage is, X amount. So if we applied those numbers and annualize that, that’s almost a person’s salary. So when we go back, let’s take a look at a couple of action plans, right?

[00:11:30] Tim Tran: You guys have missed call notifications on, are you looking at hours and days and hours that you guys are missing the most of the calls? Because it could be a lunch staff. It could be, they’re calling more towards the end of the business hour or the business day. Maybe you just need to keep the staff longer.

[00:11:45] Tim Tran: It could be an easy thing, but you just have to look at those metrics to mitigate these big missed calls.

[00:11:50] Kevin Dieny: That’s going to lead us right into the next question I have for you Tim, which is okay, we talked about the ways you miss a call. Let’s say technologically lost an IVR. Some operating to me, those are like operational process gaps that your business has, and trying to get a person to the caller as fast as possible.

[00:12:08] Kevin Dieny: Okay. Now let’s talk about the next leg. Your team is talking to people on the phone, the missed call at that point, is either the person’s an unfit unqualified caller, right. It’s not necessarily missed. It’s attended to, it’s just not a fit for the business to do business with. And then the rest of those are the missed what we call mishandled.

[00:12:31] Kevin Dieny: That bucket. So you want to comment a little bit on that and the different things that happen there.

[00:12:37] Tim Tran: When we go into that, we talk about more about training, right? So, yea yeah, marketing and everyone got the lead in the messaging correctly for the salesperson to tee it up for the sales person to close the deal. So it’s things that are said over the phone that causes that lead or that prospect not to agree to an appointment or not to come in.

[00:12:55] Tim Tran: Most times it could be training or it could be just overcoming objections, like, oh, what did you not like about if I talk about auto industry, what did you not like about the red honda civic. We have a blue Honda civic, the same features, like just giving them different, avenues to go down to get them to come into the dealership or to get them to set an appointment.

[00:13:13] Tim Tran: Oh, sorry. Nine doesn’t want this 11 work for you that same day. Just other things, to get them in.

[00:13:20] Kevin Dieny: Okay. So Matt, you have a team of call handlers who may have just gone through similar things that Tim is describing here. It could be a lack of knowledge, a lack of training, lack of product knowledge. It could be a lot of things. How do you manage and help your teams overcome objections, overcome these things.

[00:13:39] Kevin Dieny: It’s a very deep topic here, but is there anything you would maybe suggest to businesses who have call handlers, ways to help manage them, so that they can be more successful?

[00:13:48] Matt Widmyer: I think these calls that are coming in need to be, quality controlled one way or the other, right? So whether I’m doing it or whether I’m offloading it to our analysts, which I, I am for a lot of the inbounds that are coming in, but, I do listen to a good portion of them too.

[00:14:05] Matt Widmyer: And the way we have our scorecard designed, it’s completely custom to what we do. It’s essentially a yes or no question. Going down a list, it’s not like they’re reading off a list, but they’re having a conversation and there are things that we need to know about every single person calling in.

[00:14:19] Matt Widmyer: Are they already a customer of ours? Start there. What is it that they’re interested in? Are we able to meet whatever their needs are? The list goes on, but essentially you’re grading this, if you make it as black and white as possible, you’ll start identifying, okay, this person needs training, help with this and this.

[00:14:40] Matt Widmyer: And then, if you have another person on your team that is really good at those two things and you just pair them up, hey, this is how I usually address that. Or this is how I work this into my conversation. If something is glaringly bad, I will talk with them about it. And I let them know, hey, you need to start asking for the person’s title because it’s a completely different conversation if we’re talking to a marketing person or a sales guy.

[00:15:03] Matt Widmyer: At that point, if it’s a repeat thing, then you have to start going into, okay, hey, listen, if this doesn’t get fixed, I’m just gonna take you out of the rotation of people that pick up the phones, until you have a chance to improve.

[00:15:15] Matt Widmyer: It doesn’t get much easier than picking up an inbound marketing lead. So I want to make sure that, for the sake of us being able to field those, and for you to get the ROI for the money you’re spending on marketing. I want to make sure that we’re handling every one of them, not cherry picking oh this is a big one.

[00:15:32] Matt Widmyer: I’m gonna treat this one better. No, everyone gets the same treatment.

[00:15:35] Kevin Dieny: Yeah. That’s some really good advice for management to look at it. Between what’s happening with the call handlers and the sales and generating a business, some of the costs that go into that, are all the costs that have totaled up along the way in terms of actual costs, there’s the effort costs.

[00:15:51] Kevin Dieny: There’s the loss like Ronn was describing of, your brand reputation, there’s experience lost if you’re missing them at any point along the way. Of course, as well, if someone’s not a fit it’s not necessarily the worst thing, it’s still delivering a decent experience to them. Maybe we’ll leave a lasting memory in case they become a fit later.

[00:16:10] Kevin Dieny: But Ronn, could you talk a little bit about the marketing costs that go into generating an ideal prospect caller, who’s calling a business. All the marketing that goes into that.

[00:16:21] Ronn Burner: Well, in addition to the losses are the missed call, there is things that are not really accounted for, but in the marketing spend, they would be. And part of that would be. The waste of time if a call is missed, aside from the actual physical cost of things, there’s efficiency costs and the efficiency cost becomes time wasted.

[00:16:41] Ronn Burner: And like I alluded to a little bit earlier, a referral, a referral is a revenue loss. So that missed opportunity that that’s the cost of opportunity. So that opportunity costs of missing that call is adding up. And that isn’t just in the ancillary ways. The things that go into it for each lead that you have to generate and you have to nurture and move them through the funnel.

[00:17:01] Ronn Burner: The additional costs that go into the demand generation into the lead generation, which takes time and energy. Because the second somebody finds out who we are through, a Google organic search or through going to the website and filling out the form. The first thing we want to do is build a rapport and that rapport can be automated through email or whatever, and that rapport and what we’re trying to build is loyalty and trust and honesty.

[00:17:24] Ronn Burner: And that’s what’s happening if they’re getting an email that’s being sent to them. So conversely, when an email or when a telephone call comes in, we also want to relay that same rapport and relationship. If we burn that bridge right out of the gates, then we’re off and then now there is no retention.

[00:17:41] Ronn Burner: If it’s a subscription based service, like I know CallSource is. If you miss that call, that’s a subscription service that you miss, which has, you know, customer lifetime value. It has the referrals, it has upsell opportunities. There’s additional things. It’s a domino effect of what could happen.

[00:17:56] Ronn Burner: Now, of course, I’m speaking in all of all the ways, that money and revenue and time and costs are applied to get that one lead. And these, this is a worst case scenario that you would lose all of those things from what an ideal customer we hope would be, but you’re not getting, you’re getting none of that.

[00:18:15] Ronn Burner: You don’t even have the opportunity to get any of that when you miss the call. The marketing costs are pretty vast. Not only that, it’s the employees, the staff. The energies that they’re putting into it. And it has to be that we’ve always talked about the sales and marketing relationship and the handoff and the synergy and all of those things that goes even into customer support, because then the subscription service.

[00:18:37] Ronn Burner: And I know Tim handles a lot of this is when accounts are calling in specifically for something they could have been a customer for years, but you certainly like to make sure that when you have a problem, it is handled immediately because that builds that rapport. And that is really the key to all of it is trust is just trusting a brand and understanding that relationship is there, on both ends,

[00:19:02] Tim Tran: I like to think to put this in your mind and just, the cost of chasing someone after you missed their call. I don’t think anyone picks up a phone call right after you missed their call, it’s resentment almost. And getting someone to answer you call after you missed it.

[00:19:15] Tim Tran: It’s kinda hard, especially for a business.

[00:19:17] Ronn Burner: Well, they might be on the phone with your competitor.

[00:19:20] Tim Tran: Yeah, exactly.

[00:19:21] Kevin Dieny: That’s a good way to think about it.

[00:19:23] Matt Widmyer: You would assume, I would assume that though, right? If we botch one really bad, I would assume that the next thing they’re doing in spite of us is going after one of our competitors. Absolutely.

[00:19:33] Kevin Dieny: So another way to put this in perspective on the marketing cost side is that there is, this is a good place to start, there visitors to your website. This is a global metric, an average two and a half or something percent of visitors to a website. So if we just round that to 2%, that means 98% of visitors to your website are not converting in that moment, in that session. That’s a huge, that’s a lost opportunity for marketing right there.

[00:20:02] Kevin Dieny: If they were converting a hundred percent, imagine the insanity of that. So marketing is dealing with this severe loss. Of just the visitors upfront, which means a hundred percent of the costs going into generate those visitors is effective at generating only 2% into conversions of those total visitors.

[00:20:18] Kevin Dieny: The handoff between the lead to sales, marketing to sales is I think right now sitting at about 50% efficiency, meaning the marketing side, handing it over to the call, the sales, the support side, anything that takes that lead, that marketing produced 50% of the time it’s successful. It’s half the time it’s not.

[00:20:38] Kevin Dieny: So if you had a hundred people to the site and then dwindled down to two who converted. And then only one of them ended up in the hands of a sales person. Now we’re talking now we are really dwindling right. Then the next leg of that is okay now there’s the follow-up. Now there’s the communication and of industries are all over the place.

[00:20:56] Kevin Dieny: But the effectiveness of the initial call to an appointment could be between 20 and 30% or something like that. Maybe it’s higher in your industry. But from that point, it dwindles even down further. From there they have to actually buy, which is, I think on average between 10 and 15%, appointment or call to sale from that.

[00:21:15] Kevin Dieny: So it dwindles again. So we’re talking like a huge diminished number from the beginning. That’s now resulted in just a tiny little sliver of people at the end.

[00:21:26] Ronn Burner: And consider on top of all of that we know out of the gates, as a pretty general rule of thumb, that 80% of all business, regardless of if you can go to a website and just order 80% of all business actually takes place over the phone. So that just goes to show you where the priority should be.

[00:21:43] Kevin Dieny: Yeah, that’s true. So adding one additional call is a substantial savings for the marketing team from having to generate another call. Just like it it’s, if it’s 5,000 visitors down to 100, which is 2% converting to 50. They could hand it over to 10 or 12, that end up in a conversation to, 2 that end up buying.

[00:22:12] Kevin Dieny: That’s substantial. If you can add another number there. So it’s in terms of the marketing cost savings here, we’re talking huge things for, for the salesperson, for the sales, for your revenue, it means one more sale, but in another way of looking at it is one less entire chunk of your marketing budget, that has to be dedicated to generating that next call.

[00:22:31] Kevin Dieny: Tim, you did mention something and I thought you’d be a good point to reiterate on, which is the follow-up. That post call leg chasing them, you described. Can you talk a little bit more about what that entails or how they would even know to chase after someone? Like, how would they even know that something was missed or lost or something?

[00:22:49] Kevin Dieny: How would a business go about figuring that out and then how would they go about following up with them?

[00:22:54] Tim Tran: With our technology, with the CallSource technology, we do send out missed call notifications. For that side, it’s more of, did you not answer the phone if you didn’t, we’re going to send you an email or notification saying, hey, this person tried to call at this time. For those action plans, I always tell the customers, hey, let’s have someone dedicated responding back to those guys, hey, we’re really sorry we missed your call, but it’s gotta be quick.

[00:23:15] Tim Tran: It can’t be the next day. Cause as soon as that, the next day they’ve already called someone else and at least called three other people. Let’s just assume that. So if you can get them as quickly back as possible, which I call it the chase, right.

[00:23:27] Tim Tran: You’re gonna chase them. You might get a better chance of getting them to come back to your business and reengage them.

[00:23:34] Kevin Dieny: Okay so, in terms of effectiveness, Matt, how successful has your team been with the follow-up stage? Cause I think people think, well, when someone calls the business, that’s my only chance to really do business with them, you know, to make the sale, to get them to come in, to book an appointment, whatever it is.

[00:23:50] Kevin Dieny: But there is a lot of opportunity in the follow-up, but it maybe not be as easy there. So what is the, what kind of effectiveness and what kind of stuff are you seeing in the follow-ups space?

[00:24:01] Matt Widmyer: Yeah, so get them on. I think everybody on this recording knows that with the passage of time, the more time that goes by the less likely you are to get these people back on the phone.

[00:24:11] Matt Widmyer: Right. I didn’t do business with them subsequently. We strike hard and we strike fast and we relentlessly follow up with, the calls that we miss. If it’s something that we have, anything we have control over, even past inquiries.

[00:24:27] Matt Widmyer: We’ll revisit past inquiries because those are still better than a lot of, people who haven’t had any interaction with us at all. Even if they are, a dream customer, dream sized business, it’s the people that came to us for help, but for whatever reason we couldn’t deliver it. There’s a little bit of automation that takes place.

[00:24:45] Matt Widmyer: Obviously you help on the drip marketing side of things, but, yeah, that’s a priority. The whole idea is as quickly as possible.

[00:24:53] Kevin Dieny: Ronn, do you have any ideas around how marketing can try to generate better quality, higher fit leads into the business? So they’re not dealing with so many, let’s say unfit?

[00:25:05] Ronn Burner: That’s a great question and right on cue for what I wanted to comment on the heels of what Matt was just saying, as it relates to the reminder for the, from the marketing automation side of things. That once we qualify them and hand them to sales. And once they’re accepted by sales, well for all intents and purposes, marketing is kind of out of it.

[00:25:27] Ronn Burner: We don’t really know what’s going on until it gets to close won or closed lost. So the importance is understanding why it was lost. If it was won, fantastic, but if it was lost, understanding how it was lost, why it was lost, whatever indications that we can get, because now there’s a different nurture path.

[00:25:46] Ronn Burner: In this case it would be a nurture of what the objection was and then we can approach that and address that. And that’s how we, that’s how the marketing sales, relationship is really important is when they’re letting us know. So we can try to fix it the best way that we can.

[00:26:02] Ronn Burner: And on the other end of that is when they come in. I think we’re in alignment when we’re talking about aggressive marketing, where I’m not a volume marketer per se, I’m a quality marketer. So I will let them go through the nurture and provide them with as much information as I can. I want them to ask us to reach out to them or to contact them, or they can directly reach out to us rather than just trying to qualify them on a score. I’m not really a big fan of that sort of thing.

[00:26:27] Ronn Burner: However, if it works for your business and works for your business, but to qualify them better for sales on the front end is asking sales, what is your ideal customer? It depends on your organization, but understanding the ideal customer, breaking it down to as many personas as you possibly can, and verticals.

[00:26:43] Ronn Burner: Personalization is huge. We want to do that by building that relationship right out of the gates. The second they do anything, we already know their first name, and we can even put that into subject line. We can do whatever we need to do to build that relationship.

[00:26:56] Ronn Burner: So that by the time they’re nurtured into passing to sales, they’ve asked us to speak to sales. So whatever we can do to best put that on our, I call it a silver platter, to hand it to sales. And then, like I said, we. We lose that, that information until they come back to us, we don’t really know what happens on in most cases.

[00:27:14] Ronn Burner: So to provide forms and provide questions that the sales provided to marketing and what information they need, and then putting that there and asking them to provide it to us so they can move on to, to get a free downloadable piece of content that applies to them, things of that nature.

[00:27:30] Kevin Dieny: Those are all really good ideas that we’ve all implemented and tested, and it makes a big difference to close that feedback loop, especially on what’s happening to the leads that we’re generating and the closer and faster the time is there, the faster you can react, the speed to reaction on everything we’re talking about here is a really big factor.

[00:27:50] Kevin Dieny: So Tim, last bit here. Is there anything else you wanted to add to this topic that we missed or that we haven’t talked about yet? Is there anything that, you wanted to say or bring up?

[00:27:59] Tim Tran: Yeah. Yeah. I just want to circle back. And I know we were talking about missed calls. We also talked about missed calls on missed opportunities. We talked about missed opportunities, here at CallSource.

[00:28:07] Tim Tran: We do have a deal saver and lead saver program. So if we know if someone’s listening to calls and knows that someone fumbled the call, we can send an alert to you or whoever. But the idea is, the person that calls back, isn’t the person that fumbled the call.

[00:28:23] Tim Tran: You want to make sure that you send that missed opportunity back to someone that you know, is a proven closer, right? You don’t want to send it back to Tim, you just fumbled the call. Like that person is like, I just talked to you. What are you going to do for me now? Right. So you want to send it back to Matt or to Kevin.

[00:28:37] Tim Tran: It’s like, Hey, we understand you’re looking for some service, and I know we didnt meet really meet your needs. How can we help you? Right. Just that follow-up.

[00:28:48] Kevin Dieny: That’s a really interesting insight. I didn’t think about that. A different person following up, but it makes so much, it makes a lot of sense. Even just, when you get past a manager and you’re like, oh yeah, now I’m talking to someone who knows what no, has some authority here. It can be something like that, and it can be effective.

[00:29:03] Kevin Dieny: So thanks Tim, a quick summary here. I think to make this really concise. I think what we’re trying to communicate to everybody is in your business phone calls are absolutely valuable. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a phone call. It could be a lead or a prospect or something that came in in any format.

[00:29:19] Kevin Dieny: But a phone call is such an intimate experience and can leave such a lasting impression that every phone call is so valuable. The second thing, call handlers are not perfect. They’re not impervious to missing stuff. Systems aren’t perfect. People get lost in IVR, meaning they get lost, pressing the one or press two for sales or press three for support or press four for this, they get lost there.

[00:29:43] Kevin Dieny: It happens. People miss they fumble like mishandle fumble calls all the time. There could be a lot of stuff going on in somebody’s life. They could literally have just stepped up to go to the restroom and a call comes in, bang. Something can happen. Right. So. That’s going to happen. You can’t prevent a hundred percent of the calls or the leads or the things from being missed.

[00:30:01] Kevin Dieny: It just happens. It plagues every business everywhere. So coming up with a plan of. This is what I’m going to do for the stuff I get, but maybe it’s, we’re suggesting here that there’s value in coming up with something to account for the stuff that gets missed. And like Matt was saying, they may be hard to chase after them, but there’s value there and it’s sometimes better than going after people.

[00:30:22] Kevin Dieny: You might have the luxury of not needing to follow up, but there’s so much more value there that why wouldn’t you want to attempt it and give it a try, give it a whirl and see if it’ll help you grow your business. Put someone better on it. Like, Tim suggested.

[00:30:36] Kevin Dieny: And like Ronn said, really consider the full cost that it’s having on the marketing side of generating stuff that just goes into the ether that goes into the place where your business doesn’t touch it ever again. Right.

[00:30:49] Kevin Dieny: So, thank you everybody. Thanks for joining us. I hope you guys got a lot out of this and what the costs are, especially the painful reality of it for some businesses.

[00:30:58] Kevin Dieny: As Ronn said, you can do that function of average deal size and how important every single call is in your business.

[00:31:04] Tim Tran: Thank you guys.

[00:31:05] Matt Widmyer: Thanks guys.

[00:31:06] Ronn Burner: Thanks guys. Good sesh!