Over the last decade, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model has become more clearly defined. New cloud-based startups are popping up every week. They compete for market share through a variety of marketing efforts such as paid search ads and inbound content marketing, with the bigger players at the higher end pouring a lot of money into in-person events such as conferences. While online conversions metrics are often tracked with diligence, a surprising number of SaaS companies fail to track the impact of marketing efforts on phone calls. Whether your business is a cloud startup, or an enterprise SaaS company, odds are that you're closing a lot of business over the phone. If so, then tracking calls could be the quickest way launch your marketing ROI to new heights.
If you're in the SaaS world, you're probably no stranger to events, conferences and conventions. Large SaaS companies typically host their own events once a year or more. Call tracking can be crucial to determining the ROI of those events. You can use unique phone numbers on power point presentations, at conference booths, in printed collateral and more to see which efforts are really worth the investment. Without the ability to track offline efforts, it can be impossible to tell whether the spot on the conference floor that you spent thousands of dollars to reserve really paid off. You can also compare the ROI of different events to see which ones are worth returning to the following year.
SaaS companies typically invest in paid search channels like Bing and AdWords in order to drive more qualified traffic to their web properties. While it's relatively easy to track the online impact of paid search campaigns, the moment a customer picks up their phone and calls your business, all insight into lead sources are lost. Unless you have a way to track calls, that is. A first-rate call tracking solution will let you track at the campaign, ad group and associated keywords, offering different levels of granularity based on your company's budget and needs. This enables your marketing department to know which paid search groups and keywords offer the best returns. Your ad manager can then invest more in the paid search efforts proven to drive ROI.
Content marketing is becoming an increasingly important part of the SaaS business model. By optimizing content like blogs and whitepapers around the most powerful keyphrases, you can drive qualified inbound leads to your site. But if you are optimizing content for the wrong keywords, you might end up with more traffic, but it might not be the right traffic. By using a call tracking solution, you can gain insight into which keywords drive the best calls. And if you are using a CRM-based call tracking solution, you can track keywords all the way through the sales cycle.
Since Salesforce.com pioneered the SaaS revolution, CRM usage has become nearly omnipresent in the SaaS space. CRMs like Salesforce.com don't just help sales teams manage their relationships. They also build much-needed bridges between sales and marketing departments. For example, when building our call tracking solution, we made it easy to share marketing referral data with sales teams in real time. Reps can therefore instantly know who is calling and what they want to buy. We also developed routing capabilities that can actually automatically route calls to the right rep based on the promotion or URL that a prospect saw before making a call. As reps close deals, marketers can then look at real-time dashboards to see which efforts are driving ROI and adjust marketing spend accordingly.
While call tracking solutions can help marketers invest more in the most successful efforts, the best call tracking solutions also offer a routing component to help ensure that reps have the right conversations with the right prospects at the right time. Imagine that your company sells search engine optimization (SEO) software and email marketing solutions. With call tracking you could determine that a prospect called after seeing an ad in Bing for "SEO software," and then with the routing component, you could then make certain that that prospect is routed to a rep skilled at selling SEO software. Otherwise, that prospect might have been routed to the wrong agent or to a receptionist and then put on hold. Every moment a prospect is on hold increases the chances that they'll hang up and call a competitor. A call tracking solution with intelligent routing capabilities can completely solve this problem.
If you're considering investing in a call tracking solution, read Call Tracking: The Definitive Buyers' Guide to find out more ways that call tracking can add value to your SaaS business.