How Call Tracking Software Can Increase Your New Customer Conversions – 011

Use Call Tracking Software To Gain Insights and Increase Customer Conversions

A key component to any marketing strategy is trackability. One area that is often overlooked by local businesses is tracking the number of phone calls that come in. This is a huge mistake! However, it is pretty easy to solve with a call tracking software solution. We’ll break down the features and benefits of a good call tracking solution, and share the best practices that we’ve compiled over the years – both from using this technology ourselves, and with the hundreds of clients we’ve worked with. It’s surprisingly affordable, and the benefits are numerous!

YOU’LL LEARN

• Why you should use call tracking software
• What is call tracking software
• How to use call tracking and recording to measure your results
• How to establish a baseline of leads you’re currently getting
• How to obtain a phone number for any area code
• Using tracking phone numbers to measure marketing campaigns
• Using tracking phone numbers to test market in specific cities
• How to use call recordings to train your sales and service teams
• How to increase your sales conversions using call recordings
• Best practices for efficient call reviewing as a manager or owner
• How to alert your team of new customer calls with “whispers”
• How to use call recordings to find new product or service opportunities
• Using call tracking software instead of a notepad when you’re mobile
• How to leverage call data to develop call handling scripts or talking points

Thanks for Listening!

Here is the transcription from Episode 11 – How Call Tracking Software Can Increase Your New Customer Conversions;

Jesse: Hey everyone, welcome back to Local SEO Tactics. Jesse Dolan here with Bob Brennan.
Today we’re going to jump a little bit outside of the usual SEO platform. In the previous
episodes, we spent a lot of focus talking about how to design your webpages, how to
get your site ranked, and a lot of the tips there. We’re gonna be circling back to that in
future episodes. But, as we’ve talked, we’re here to help local service businesses. It’s not
just about getting your website ranked and found. You wanna turn those into customers
that are going to pay you money for your products and services that you’re offering. So,
today we’re going to talk about handling phone calls, and some of the tools, and things
that we use for that.

Bob: Yeah, this is a tools’ episode.

Jesse: Yup.

Bob: It’s really tools that’ll help you, again, like you said, convert. We’re going to be talking
primarily about call tracking, and how important it is as a tool. Because again, as a small
business you’re going to spend all this time and energy to get people to ring you up, so
to speak, and it’s going to get handed off to your team.

This topic gets a little weird. When I was first looking at this product, and we were first
looking it over, I just felt strange because they didn’t want to be the big brother, so to
speak, listening to everybody’s conversation.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: It’s a little different because, when you really get into this, down the road and you really
understand what it costs, a lot of times we figure out our average cost per call, costs to
us in raw marketing, is probably anywhere from $20 to $30.

Jesse: Yeah.

Bob: Well, that adds up pretty quick and it adds up real quick if you’re not converting and
you’re not closing.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: So, you kind of have a vested interest in getting this stuff down real well and that’s
where these tools come in.

Jesse: We should say too, that’s not even … we’re not talking about pay-per-click advertising or
…

Bob: No.

Jesse: … we’re not paying for those customers, but when you look at all the time, energy, and
money that you put out there just to get those phone calls …

Bob: Right.

Jesse: … that’s a real number.

Bob: And handing that call over to somebody in your team who doesn’t realize that, is kind of
like handing your kid $20 bills everyday just for the heck of it and they just think money
grows on trees.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: Again, I’m not trying to put your team under the bus, it’s just your job, as managers and
leaders, is to build them up, help you help them help themselves. And we’ll get into that
probably next episode. But really, give them the tools so they can polish their craft and
their trade, and ideally close a lot of these calls.

Jesse: I think it’s important to note too that for the most part, for being a local service
business, the owner or the manager isn’t always the one answering the phone, almost
by definition or even by nature, right?

Bob: Right.

Jesse: We’d like to think that we’re the bees-knees when we answer the phone, nobody does it
better than us, but you’re not gonna be there for every phone call. So, even if you are
part of the time or even for the majority, these things we’re gonna talk about today are
still applicable because you’re just not gonna answer every phone call and somebody
else is gonna be handling them.

Bob: Yeah, and I wanna talk about a lot of the mistakes I made with this tool, because this is a
tool that can be used incorrectly and when it is …

Jesse: Sure.

Bob: … it’s not good, it’s not good at all, and I made a lot of those mistakes. And really, I think
as business owners we really wanna control a lot of things. We’ll give directions to our
team and they really only have two choices, and that’s to either comply or defy, right?

Jesse: Yeah.

Bob: If you’re defiant all the time, then you’re not doing your job properly and you’re not
coaching them properly to handle the call, so to speak.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: There’s a lot of good reasons why to use a call tracking program or service, and we’ll hit
on a couple of those.

The first one I’m gonna cover is to create a baseline. So a lot of times you’ll launch these
campaigns and you’ll say, “Hey are they working?” You really, actually, before you
launch the campaign, you need to think ahead if you can 30 days or so, enact the call
tracking on your website or even your main number and have it work that way to say,
“Okay, we average 80 calls a month.” And you enact some kind of marketing campaign,
whether it’s developing your SEO or Google AdWords, or Facebook, or whatever the
case is. And then you can measure that metric and say, “You know, we had a Facebook
campaign and we got five extra calls.” Well great, what did that cost you? “Well it cost
us $1,000.” Well that’s $200 a call.

Jesse: Might not have worked very good.

Bob: Right. You better be selling some pretty good stuff to get ROI on that. Again, creating
that baseline. Then from there, really any new campaign you come up with, you wanna
assign this tracking number to it. Again, under the same guise. What’s our ROI? Are we
getting good ROI on it? And/or what kind of customers calling in off this specific
campaign?

Jesse: Right. Can I ask you a question and back up just a second?

Bob: Sure.

Jesse: Cause I don’t think we covered it right on the front side. What is call tracking? If
nobody’s using that right now, what is that? What does it even mean?

Bob: That’s a good question. I’ll get into that in a little bit and then I want you to jump in.

Jesse: Sure.

Bob: Cause you’re more the technical guy. But it’s really recording the calls that come in. And
it can give you information such as, specifically who’s calling, if they have caller ID. It can
give you, obviously, the length of the call, their phone number. And, what’s really slick
about this technology is, it’s all recorded and it’s put in a WAV file and it’s stored on a
program and, in some cases, it’s sent out to your email, so you’re made aware of who’s
calling or what the length of the call is. Or, if you have a key manager or key people on
your team that need to see that, it can be sent out to them. That’s kind of it in a
nutshell.

Jesse: Yeah.

Bob: If you can add some of the other?

Jesse: No, I think that’s a great overview. Some of the more technical tidbits is, this number
replaces the phone number on your website. This can be applicable to pretty much
anything but particularly we’re talking in this example on your website. That’s where it
all starts. You have to put it out there for people to be able to call you. So, whatever
your current phone number is, if you’ve got a tracking number, you’re going to have to
go to some kind of third party service that’s provisioned a phone number for you.

Bob: Yup.

Jesse: You can usually pick whatever area code you want or an 800 number. Usually you’re
going to pick whatever area code you’re in and find a number that’s similar or,
depending on how your metropolitan area is laid out. Up in the Twin Cities here, we
have four basically area codes that define our area. And, depending on which area code
you’re using, we kind of know if you’re Southwest, Northeast corner of the metro and
things like that. So you can put some logic into it for that, and you replace that phone
number on your website with this tracking phone number. And then, whenever
somebody calls that number, you can forward it to wherever you want.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: You can still have these calls coming to your main receptionist desk, if you have one or
wherever the calls are going, that doesn’t change. All that really changes, if you have a
tracking number, is the number that the customers are calling in on.

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: So, after that, the service that you’re using to provision this call tracking number and
provide the tracking services, does all the work, which we’re going to dive right back
into those here, but that’s all we’re talking about, is getting a number from a third party
service to replace an existing number that you’re already using. Or, as Bob said, if you’re
going to try out a campaign, this is a dumb example, but maybe just on your business
cards. You want a different number to see who’s calling off of the business cards we
hand out. You know, you could put a tracking number on your business card and use it
for that. So it’s really wherever you want to use it, is up to you. But that’s the nuts and
bolts. It’s just a different phone number to replace an existing number or a new one,
and then all the features kind of take over from there.

Bob: Yeah, numbers too, not to get too far into the weeds, but you can get additional
numbers put on your website to reflect a bigger, let’s say a bigger company. We’re in
the area code 651 in the Twin Cities. But let’s say I wanted to represent more
Minneapolis. So 651 is more of a St. Paul phone number.

Jesse: Yes.

Bob: Much smaller population, smaller city. It’s kind of what Fort Worth is to Dallas, if you
will.

Jesse: Yup.

Bob: It’s smaller. If you wanted to represent a bigger company or bigger presence in the
metro, you may put multiple numbers on there, just so people have, again, the idea
that, “Oh, hey. They have a Minneapolis office.” So there’s a 612 number or a
Bloomington office. But you get the general idea.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: And, again, those are other metrics that you can measure, and say, “Why are we getting
all these 612 calls? Hmm. We may have to shift things to market more heavily towards
Minneapolis versus the St. Paul area.”

Jesse: Right.

Bob: So, pretty powerful stuff that’s relatively inexpensive to enact.

Jesse: Yeah. Compared to all the other things you’re going to do for marketing and, again,
getting into that $20 or $30 or more for actual cost for a new phone call, the cost you’re
going to spend on the call tracking is insignificant.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: We’re not going to get into pricing. There’s lots of different options out there. But really,
it’s not expensive at all. This will be one of the cheapest things that you do. And we’re
covering it today. Again, this is not SEO, this is a tools’ topic for you. We’re covering it
because it’s so impactful for the price that you’ve just got to do it.

Bob: Yeah, and we use it as a tool for our clients because we want to deliver. And, basically,
when we can, we try to create a baseline with them and say, “Hey, here’s a tracking
number. We want to see before we do anything, or while we’re doing the work in the
background to get your web stuff going, we want to know where your baseline is.”

Jesse: Yup.

Bob: So, we both can look each other in the eye and say, “Hey, we brought a value to you.
You can measure those metrics.”

Jesse: Yup.

Bob: And that’s, again, part of this we’re going to get into here is measuring all that.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: One of the things that, again, call tracking will do is to help train your team up. And this
is, again, where I made a mistake. So I came from the managerial standpoint of, “What
can I catch people doing wrong?” And scold them or discipline them for that, or
whatever the case is, when I should’ve been coming at it from a coaching perspective to
say, what can I help them do well? And, more importantly, what incentives can I create
for them to do well?

Jesse: Sure.

Bob: Right? So nobody wants to do situps. If the end goal is to run the Ironman Marathon,
that’s a big goal, that’s a huge canyon that you’ve got to get through. If you’re a good
trainer, I would assume that you’re going to figure out how to give that person a Scooby
snack, so to speak, after they do 30 or 50 pushups.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: Okay, now let’s move on to the next level where you’re going to get this reward. And, if
you can give those different rewards to people that are part of your team, then you can
achieve those loftier goals. So it’s a great tool for helping them answer the call correctly
and helping convert.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: And so, if you can convert 30% to 50%, well now, your cost for customers drops quite a
bit.

Jesse: And when you say for helping the team with that, that’s to play the audio back, right?

Bob: Right, yeah.

Jesse: Listen to the calls. What was I doing good? Also, what was I doing bad?

Bob: Yup.

Jesse: Or even an example of, if I handle a call good and, if we’ve got five people that answer
the calls on our team, you might want to play my call.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: Like, “Hey. Look at this. Jesse totally nailed it.” Or, the inverse, “Sorry Jesse, I hate to
throw you under the bus, Jesse and I talked ahead of time so he knows I’m doing this
but, this is a good example of a call gone bad.”

Bob: Yeah, be real careful there. I mean, nobody likes to get criticism in front of a group.

Jesse: No.

Bob: So any criticism you have, constructive criticism, you have to do privately. Any
edification, you can do that publicly …

Jesse: Right.

Bob: … to somebody. But be very careful. It’s going to take a while til your team is okay
listening to each other’s calls.

Jesse: Yeah, that’s a great point.

Bob: Nobody wants their faults thrown out on the table for everybody to see.

Jesse: Well, not just your faults. I think anybody, we’ve had experience listening to your own
voice played back, right?

Bob: Right.

Jesse: It’s always weird. Now, imagine doing that in front of everybody else and with your job
being part of this. Yeah, you got to dip your toe in the water. That’s a great point
because, otherwise, it gets a little weird.

Bob: Yeah, and I would say the best teaching happens when I answer the phone, I follow the
script. I know I’ve done something wrong and I let my people listen to it. Say, “This is
what you don’t want to do.” Cause they know you’re not an ogre or whatever the deal
is.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: So, it’s great tool. And, again, it can get a little creepy, like, “Oh, I’m listening to
everything.” So what I do is, as we develop let’s say a new program or a new campaign
and it has to be scripted a certain way is, I don’t listen to every call once they’ve gotten
the basic core down. I’ll go back and I’ll listen to a percentage.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: And, if they’re fine in that percentage, great. If they’re not in that percentage and
there’s glaring issues, then I have to go back and I have to listen to the majority of the
calls just to make sure, okay, yeah, this is definitely not going in the direction we need it
to go. And we go back, we go over the script or even rewrite the script. And just give
your people plenty of time …

Jesse: Right.

Bob: … to get through this, cause it takes the average person a day or three of answering the
calls to get that script dialed in. And try not to do a script change too frequently.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: I mean, we can only change so much. I mean, again, we’re kind of getting into the weeds
but it’s just all part of what it takes to do the scripting.

Jesse: I like what you said too, for not listening to every call. Cause, if you’re going to listen to
every single phone call, you might as well be taking the calls yourself. You’re just literally
replicating the amount of labor time that it took to take the calls.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: Do a percentage. We usually estimate 10%. Checking on 10%. If you’re not finding
anything wrong, then move on. If you do find something wrong, then if you want to
jump up to 50% or 100% and go from there. I would say that’s probably applicable if
you’re talking thirty to fifty calls a month. If you’re getting like twenty calls a day, start
out with the one percent. If you tap into one percent and it’s cool, you’re good. If you
find something bad, then bump I up to ten and then go from there, because you don’t
want to mire yourself into listening to all these.

Bob: No.

Jesse: You’re going to get rotted with it and it’s just going to be a negative thing that you don’t
want to do and then it falls away.

Bob: And you really want your managers involved in this and have them own it.

Jesse: Yeah.

Bob: And give you the feedback. And then, the same thing. You don’t want them listening to
every call. You want them to dial back to that 10%.

Jesse: Yup.

Bob: And when you do launch a new campaign, you as an owner or upper management, then
you want to jump in yourselves and listen to those calls with your management team …

Jesse: Right.

Bob: … so they get the idea.

Jesse: On the topic of your calls, if we move on quick too, is something that we find pretty
cool. So depending on your service or what you’re selling or providing, some calls may
be three, five, seven minutes, some might be longer. But you might see some calls might
be 20 seconds, or thirty or forty seconds.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: You’ll get to understand your business as you’re listening to these. Those may be
hangups or wrong numbers, or they could be somebody who got turned off
immediately. That’s something you can do as well. Pretty much every solution that’s out
there is going to tell you the duration of that call. So, if you’re going to pick one of your
ten percent you’re going to listen to, you’re probably going to want to look for those
two, three, five … kind of whatever’s your average type of a phone call, or if it’s an
extremely long one. So you don’t have to pick them totally at random.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: You’ll kind of get to the groove of what’s a good call, what’s a bad call, and know what
to look for. Pay those things mind because you don’t to be picking a bunch of calls that
are all just hangups and assuming that’s what they all are, get a good representation
when you’re doing that.

Bob: So one of the things too that call tracking will do is give you good analytics. I’m going to
hand this off to you, if you want to talk about that a little bit.

Jesse: Yeah, you can get a lot of great information in the analytics of the calls. So whether you
want to experiment with things, or just get an idea of what’s happening. Let’s just say, if
you have a reception desk and maybe you’ve got two people up there answering the
phones. Do you need them up there all the time? What are they doing? What aren’t
they doing? Are they busy? Not that we want to work people to death but, part of being
an owner, manager, and operator is being efficient, right?

Bob: Right.

Jesse: And everybody pulling their weight. So all of this is logged. So you know what days of
the week you get the most calls, what times of the day you get the most calls. Again, the
duration of those calls. How many went to voicemail. How many were answered, how
many were missed. Pretty much anything you can think of as far as a trackable criteria
or a stat for that phone call, is going to be provide back to you in the form of reporting.
So you can look week-to-week, month-to-month, see what things are changing, if
there’s seasonalities. And to be able to impact your staffing. If you know you’re busiest
from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and, if you’re finding that a lot of calls are getting missed
when you look at the reports, you need some support there. Or maybe you need a
tweak to your phone system to rollover if it’s not answered, or things like that. So it’s
not just listening to the calls, it’s the actual data and logging these too.

We should back up for a quick second, as well. Depending on the industry you’re in, or
even the state that you’re in, your ability to record those calls, there may be some legal
implications, right?

Bob: Right. Yeah.

Jesse: Most of the time, you’re going to want to put a message on the front side of that call …

Bob: Yeah, that’s really important.

Jesse: Yeah. So, when a customer calls you, they hear a quick message and we’ve all hear of
this. You hear a message, “This call may be recorded for training,” or something along
those lines. Usually, for most states and, again, check your laws. We’re not going to go
state-by-state here, but you got to give some kind of disclaimer that it may be recorded.

Bob: Right up front. Yup.

Jesse: You don’t have to say that it is, you can say that it may be, if you want, or however you
want to soft sell it. But the customer has to have some kind of awareness usually that
they’re being recorded.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: The software that you’re using for this call tracking is going to have that built in. And
usually, kind of on the flip side of that coin, there’s also a cool feature in the industry.
It’s usually referred as a whisper feature, and that alerts your receptionist, or whoever’s
answering the phone, of that incoming call. So just kind of walking through a call here. If
I pick up the phone, if I’m a customer I’m going to here that his call might be recorded,
it’s going to ring a time or two. And, if Bob’s on the other end, I’m going to pick up the
phone. He’ll pick up the phone, and my end is still ringing, but on Bob’s end he gets the
announcement saying, “Incoming call from Plumbing Website,” and then the call is
connected.

So you might get calls on your mainline, you might get calls internally, somebody dialing
your extension. The cool part about getting a tracking number is, it also alerts you that
his is a call from that website. So, if you know, let’s just say you’re an emergency
plumber. People that are calling are going to be in an emergency. You pick up the
phone, and it’s a call from the website, be ready to act. Kind of be on alert and ready to
serve them. Don’t put them on hold or things like that. So having that alert to where
those call’s are coming from is also very important.

The other cool part for the analytics is kind of more on the reporting end of it. So we
talked about types of things that it will pull. You can also set up automated reports on
these. So, if you’re the manager and, as Bob said, for sure when you kick this off you
want to be listening to these calls. Maybe your teams just nailing it with A+ level of
service and you back off, and you don’t want to be reviewing these calls all the time.
You should be able to set up some kind of weekly, monthly, or whatever interval you
want to spit a report out for you, to give you all that analytical data. Number of calls,
time of the day. If you have multiple locations let’s say for your business, you should be
able to group these and say location A, B, and C, how many calls, and kind of put all that
together. The reporting in these software suites are pretty cool. So you won’t be lacking
in any data to make decisions on.

Bob: Yeah, and I would tell you too. What’s nice about the number of calls in the analytics too
is, you can pretty much measure your revenue based on that. So, obviously, if your
number of calls go up, your revenue should be going up. And, if not, well then you need
to dig into the calls and why you’re not converting. Unfortunately, if the calls go down
too, the revenue’s going to go down to some degree.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: One other thing to throw out there too with the whisper feature, make sure you tell
your team about the whisper feature …

Jesse: Yeah.

Bob: … because, when they don’t know about it, they will hang up cause they’ll think it’s
some kind of a robot sales call …

Jesse: Right.

Bob: … or whatever the deal is. And we’ve had that happen with a lot of our clients that use
our services. We’ll implement a call tracking into it and, again, they think everybody on
their team knows about it. But George was sick that day and didn’t get the memo …

Jesse: Right.

Bob: … and George’s is hanging up on every call, and that’s not good.

Jesse: No.

Bob: Again, you’re losing money on that deal. And you want to make sure you brief your
team on it.

Jesse: I’m going to throw in another quick thing that we implemented for ourselves and other
customers is, kind of more like, I guess I’ll call it like a hot line feature, where these calls
come in from a certain number, it’s just kind of regular business. If you have some kind
of a hotline or VIP number, again, to alert on that and just to kind of, again, differentiate
so you know what’s coming on. If you’ve got a receptionist sitting there answering all
the calls maybe for multiple locations or, again, for a different product, or service, or a
hotline, or some kind of VIP support, immediately triggers them to deliver that level of
support without asking the customer a bunch of questions. Oh, where are you located?
What are you calling about? Or things like that. So you can build a little triggering
intelligence into that whisper feature to communicate to your team, as long as they all
know that it’s coming …

Bob: That’s right.

Jesse: … you can build that in to start that customer service process, literally before you even
connect with that customer. So, it takes a little bit of thought but, again, for that same
price point, you’re using all the features that come with it. So it’s not just about
recording the calls or logging the calls. This is truly a system in improving your customer
service and your revenue at the end of the day. You convert more customers.

Bob: Yup. It’s pretty slick. And one of the things I like about call tracking is to listen for
opportunities.

Jesse: Yeah.

Bob: So there had been times in our business when our sales person would answer the
phone, and they’d be frustrated because somebody was asking for a certain service that
we didn’t provide. And I’ve used this story that a friend of mine called me asking for that
same service, and he said, “Hey. You really should provide it.” “What do you mean?”
“Well, your competition is charging $400.”

Jesse: Right.

Bob: “What?” And I dug into it, and it’s a huge opportunity. And so, by listening to your call
tracking, you can kind of see between the lines. Again, if one out of five people are
calling their pizza shop asking for a vegan pizza, you might want to switch gears and get
the old vegan pizza thing going.

Jesse: So, you’re telling me businesses change and shift, and there’s dynamics that you got to
be aware of what customers are asking for?

Bob: Oh, yeah.

Jesse: And you’re also telling me that you’re team won’t relay that verbatim if you ask them?

Bob: That’s a great point. That’s a really good point. So another thing with the call tracking is,
first hand you can hear what your customers are asking for.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: And you can hear what your employees are …

Jesse: What are trying to say?

Bob: What I’m trying to say, you can ask your employees what the customer is asking for, but
you can actually hear firsthand what they’re asking for.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: It isn’t always the same. Again, your team members, they’re doing the best they can.
They may not have the vision you do for the company, but your customers are always
going to tell you the truth. And, if you’re listening for it, they’ll you the truth.

Jesse: Well, I think, the example you gave is spot on. If people are calling for a product or
service you don’t offer, your team may not have any clue that you want to be looking for
those opportunities or that you want to expand the business or add on related products
and services. So they’re just saying no, and to them it’s a bit of an annoyance.

Bob: Yeah, that’s right.

Jesse: I mean, why do people keep calling for this. And, if you ask them, “You guys got any
ideas on maybe what we can upsell, what we can do?” “No, no nothing.” But, if you
listen to these calls and pull those out. You’ll say, “Holy crap. You’ve got three people a
week calling for this service. Let’s look at expediting…”

Bob: Figure it out.

Jesse: “… adding or expediting to our deal.” So absolutely get the voice of the customer
directly. That’s a little more intense. That kind of gets into that auditing phone calls.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: And listening to them, not just that quick sample. Sometimes you want to take that
deeper dive into it and block off maybe the better part of a day. Or grab a beer at night
and listen to them.

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: Maybe not a bottle, maybe a glass of wine, you never know.

Bob: But, yeah, that kind of just brings the guard down and you can try and listen in between
the lines.

Jesse: Right.

Speaker 3: Hey everyone, jumping in the middle of the episode here for about 30 seconds, wanted
to let you know, if you like what you’re hearing about this call tracking, we actually have
our own solution we’re going to be coming out with. At the end of the episode, we’re
going to talk a little bit more about that and kind of tease it. It’s not ready yet, it’s going
to be in Beta. But, if you want to sign up and learn more about it, go to
intrycks.com/calls, intrycks.com/calls. And you can get on the Beta waiting list. We’re
going to have our own call tracking solution. It’s going to be pretty sweet. All the bells
and whistles that you’re hearing us talk about and some of the features that you’re
going to hear in the rest of the episode here. So stay tuned if you like it. Check it out,
again, intrycks.com/calls. We’d love to have you help us test it out.

Bob: So one of the things too, you mentioned Jesse, is kind of a no pad feature.

Jesse: Yeah, for sure. One of the really cool things I like using this for and I always tell all of our
customers that sign up for our services, which I think everyone is aware, we provide
web services and web design. So we always recommend using a tracking number. One
of the key things I tell people, usually we’re dealing with service businesses. People wear
many hats, whether they’re out there in the field, maybe performing some service, or
maybe you’re driving around between locations, or running to the bank, who knows
what?

Bob: Right.

Jesse: But, if you’re out there, and you’re getting a phone call. Maybe you’re even in the back
of the shop and running around, depending on your phone system, and you get a call. I
think we’ve all been there. “Hold on, let me grab a piece of paper and a pen.” Or, “let
me type some notes on my computer quick.” When you know that this call is recorded,
you just keep rolling. You can take those notes later.

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: You don’t have to stop, you don’t have to pull over, if you’re driving. You don’t have to
worry about being distracted, multitasking, and all that. Just stay engaged in the
conversation. Keep asking questions. Anything that you know you would’ve needed to
write down, you’re already talking about it over the phone. Once you get back later,
you’re going to get that email. As soon as the phone call hangs up, the system’s going to
send you an email with that recording. Play it back, take the notes then, or if you had an
assistant, say, “Look for that email coming in, I just took a phone call. Shoot me over the
notes on that.” Or, “put it into the system for the order,” or whatever it is. But, yeah, it
basically acts like a notepad. It’s all recorded and you’re going to get everything
verbatim for exactly what they were trying to do.

If you’re dyslexic, transpose a number wrong or something else …

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: … you can always kind of check back on that. There’s a lot of cool features just in that
kind of historical purpose for it.

Bob: And then a couple of other things I wanted to discover before we wrap up this topic.
Well, a couple of things I wanted to cover real quick is, there are certain industries
you’re going to have to be careful with this. Now, that would be anything in the medical
industry that requires HIPPA regulations.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: And also, anything, let’s say in the legal industry, same thing there. It may actually cause
people to hang up. “This call will be recorded.” “Great, I don’t want it.”

Jesse: Right.

Bob: So you’re going to have to understand what your industry requires there.

Jesse: Let me jump in on that. Almost all these call tracking solutions, at least the ones that
we’ve been involved with, have the ability to turn off the actual recording. And we just
gave a lot of reasons why those recordings are important, but as you pointed out Bob,
sometimes you might not be able to actually do that.

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: You can still utilize a service like this. There’s still a lot of great analytics you can get. You
can log the calls, again, time of day. You get all these activity-type reports, even if you
can’t get that recording. And, in some instances, maybe even maybe you even need to
block out the caller ID number so you can’t get access to that or show that. You can
mask that as well. But you can still, there’s still lots of value because the cost in this is so
low.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: To know for everything else you’re doing, the times of the days, the frequencies, and
the volumes. There’s a lot of great indicators you can get, even if you’ve got to skip the
recordings.

Bob: Indeed, and then, there’s some extreme cases that this comes in handy. There’s times
where your customers make the statement, “Well, I didn’t tell you I wanted this.”

Jesse: Right.

Bob: Or some other statement. You’ve got a recording of it. Now, I don’t know how well it
holds up in a legal setting, but maybe just from a customer service perspective and say,
“Hey, just remember this is recorded.” You have to be tactful about how you do it …

Jesse: Right.

Bob: … but, there’s extreme situations. We’ve never had to use that. I think one or two of our
clients have.

Jesse: It’s come up though, yup.

Bob: And it’s saved them thousands of dollars. So it’s there for that extreme situation. But, I
guess, I won’t 100% count on it holding up in a legal situation.

Jesse: Yeah, we make no claim as to your court cases, right? Just to be clear.

Bob: And then there’s this kind of final note I want to cover is, how to work with your team
with this. And, again, it’s about developing the scripts, and figuring out what the
customer’s looking for, and what you can give them. And between you and your team
sometimes, you can develop the script together, if you don’t have that direction.

Jesse: Yeah.

Bob: And experiment with it over time. And, again, measuring how many of these are you
closing with this script?

Jesse: Yeah.

Bob: And then, if we change the script this way, of deliver it this way, or we add on to it, does
that number change?

Jesse: Do you think people need a script?

Bob: They do. I need a script. I own the show in many cases that I’ve used internally, and I
found myself just going the wrong direction.

Jesse: Yeah.

Bob: And it causes you to focus. It’s forced at first because it isn’t your own words and you’re
reading from a card, or whatever the case is. But then, after a while, you get
comfortable with it. And when you measure and get this dialed in, I think it’s huge. I
think it’s absolutely critical.

Jesse: Yeah.

Bob: And, I can tell businesses that don’t have a process in this area and the ones that do.
And I think it’s night and day.

Jesse: Yup.

Bob: Again, it’s not hammering people into the ground but it’s about getting that return so
everybody can make money, and finding a way to reward those people, again, that
follow the script consistently. Give them incentives for doing that. I just think it’s a great
tool, it’s going to help you and your business tremendously.

Jesse: I think, back to that script part. I mean, obviously, the answer is yes. You do need a
script. You’re not going to script out the whole conversation but, at the very least, to
kick that of for a new customer. If a repeat customer calls every three days, you’re not
going to give them the spiel every single time. But, if there’s some kind of
announcement at the front that you want to make, or a question you want to lead with,
kind of dependent on what your industry and service is, you want predictability, right? If
you’ve got four different people throughout the course of the week and times of the day
that are answering the phones, you should have a general expectation that they’re all
going to handle it the same way and perform the same way, to convert those people
into customers. So your script can be as intense or as loose as your business can afford,
depending on what you’re selling. But you should have that expectation of consistency.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: And we’ve definitely found internally and with all of our customers that, put that sucker
into a document, so everybody can see it, read it, kind of be immersed with it. You’re
not, like you said, you’re not going to read from it every time once you get going, but it’s
going to get you on the same page, no pun intended, as everybody else.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: And saying the same thing, and that’s again, part of the overall customer experience.
Just like, you’re going to listen to these calls and find out what was the crap, what did
you really do bad, what did you really do good? Those changes are going to be
manifested into your script, so everybody just does the good. Or we found, probably a
good example to bring up quick is, there’s questions that people might always ask. For
an auto repair business, what’s your labor rate? How long’s it going to take? Is there any
appointments today? If you can put all that into the script on the front side for these
customers, again, that just instills that confidence. You’re a professional organization,
you know what you’re talking about.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: You know what they’re going to be asking already and that just helps them decide that
you’re going to be the one.

Bob: Yeah. It takes that stress down.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: Cause they’re calling you for a service. Why are they calling you for a service? Cause
there’s usually stress involved. The car’s broke, their HVAC’s broke. If you can de-tune
that stress and bring it down a notch or two …

Jesse: Right.

Bob: … then price, actually, is secondary.

Jesse: Sure.

Bob: And I think a well-scripted, well-crafted script is going to do exactly that.

Jesse: Yup.

Bob: I’m going to just close with a couple of things. One, I want to tell the story how we saved
$18,000 with call tracking.

Jesse: Sure.

Bob: So, we were looking at a radio ad. This was probably about six months ago. We were
looking at major radio stations, trying to find out what it cost for a radio ad. Like a 30-
second spot, I want to say, is about 150 bucks.

Jesse: Yeah. Per 30 seconds.

Bob: Per 30 seconds. So 150 to let’s say 200 dollars at least in our market.

Jesse: Yup.

Bob: Other markets it’s going to be more or less, whatever. And so, they like to tell you that
you’re going to need to do it for three months to create brand awareness.

Jesse: Yup.

Bob: Nobody’s going to buy your product or service because you’ve got to create that brand.

Jesse: They’re not going to hear your commercial once and call. Yeah.

Bob: Right. So you work that out and that was close to $18,000. And I said, “You know, I don’t
have $18,000, but I’d really like to use your service. So why don’t we do this. We’ll
create a website, we won’t use our actual company name. We’ll create a website with a
certain name. In this case it was 15-minute repair. Anyway, the net is, 60 commercials
later we got three calls.

Jesse: Yup.

Bob: And we had an arrangement that was so much per call.

Jesse: Yup.

Bob: Let’s just say, I saved a ton of money. And I gave them the license to change how they
did the ad.

Jesse: Yeah.

Bob: Look, you guys, it’s your job to make the phone ring. You’re telling me how big our
market is and everything else, and how great this is, and how our biggest problem’s
going to be answering the phone. Well, when we got done, we only got three calls. And
you know what, that saved us $18,000, I think, on the low end.

Jesse: Yeah.

Bob: And that’s the beauty of call tracking. You can assign it to any campaign, just about any
campaign you want to do.

Jesse: I’d like to say too, we wouldn’t have a problem spending $18,000, if we would’ve got the
results …

Bob: Oh, yeah.

Jesse: … that warranted that and gave the ROI.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: For the $18,000, who wouldn’t want an instant repeat on something that’s making
money. But to throw that out there, we were only nearly hoping it would work.

Bob: Right.

Jesse: It was a pretty big gamble. So, however, you use these call tracking numbers to test, to
measure, to quantify, and prove out what is and isn’t working. There’s lots of different
ways you can apply it. That’s a really good one. Like you were just saying, I think I cut
you off there. But billboards, radio, anybody that can kind of pitch that kind of concept.

Bob: You bet, you bet. I love it when sales people come in trying to sell me something as far
as a marketing deal. And, hey, yeah, I’m all over it. I tell you what, what do you think
each call’s going to cost me? And they kind of look at you blank. Well, what do you think
it should cost me? And he’ll come up with a number. And it’s like, “Great, I tell you what.
Put that billboard up, put this phone number up there, and I’ll give you $30 for every
call, or $100 for every call.”

Jesse: Right.

Bob: And they get real quiet and leave.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: That’s the world we live in. Everything can be measured, every piece of data that’s out
there can be measured.

Jesse: Yup.

Bob: So do you want to talk a little bit about our product that we’re going to be developing.

Jesse: Yeah. So we’ve used half a dozen different call tracking software solutions over the last
decade and really kind of fine tuned what we do and don’t like about them. Tried pretty
much all the major ones, if you Google it. So we’re coming up with our own solution.
Yeah, it’s going to have some pretty cool features. Kind of taking all the best and
incorporating that. Taking all the stuff that’s kind of excess and that we personally don’t
use and most of our customers don’t use, and not really worrying about that as far as a
future list. And trying to bring something that’s easy, looks good, not complicated. If you
want to sign up for a service like this, you don’t want to become an expert in call
tracking software management, right?

Bob: No.

Jesse: You just want to listen to the calls, you want to have a dashboard, and run some cool
reports that look good and communicate the information to you. So that’s kind of our
goal, is to give some very powerful features. And we’ll talk more about that probably
when it’s actually released. Coming up, we’ll dive into it in a future episode. Still, fine
tuning some things under the hood right now. If anybody out there’s interested, we’re
going to be offering kind of a free Beta trial to check it out and see what it’s all about. I’ll
tell you, what we’ll probably do cause we don’t have anything ready. You kind of put me
on the spot real quick, I’ll cut in a link at the end of this in post production and I’ll tell
you guys where to go, what website to go to sign up. We definitely want to get some
people on board for some Beta tests.

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: Help us prove it out. Is it working? Is it good? Is there any bugs in it, before we fully
launch it. So, if anybody’s interested in getting a good deal on some call tracking
software, how you want to roll it out, definitely check it out at the end of the show here
and stay tuned on that. So, yeah, it’s good to bring up.

Bob: And I just want to thank all you guys for listening. I’m really shocked and surprised how
many people are listening to us.

Jesse: Yeah.

Bob: And it’s starting to grow literally all over the country and out of country to some degree.

Jesse: Yup.

Bob: I just want to share a quick conversation I had over the weekend with Hajiss from
Atlanta. And it’s really neat to connect with you out there. You sent us an email. Hajis is
a business owner. He owns a pizza place in Atlanta. And it’s just neat connecting with
other business owners. They have the same challenges we all have.

Jesse: Yup.

Bob: And it’s interesting how you just instantly connect when you go through your trials and
all your …

Jesse: Struggle is real.

Bob: … your struggles, and stuff like that. So I’m hoping we can work with Hajiss down the
road in some form or another, and just help his business grow, because, like all of us, he
wants to spend more time with his family. He’s got the same dreams you and I have, and
he hustles. You can tell he’s a hustler.

Jesse: Right.

Bob: I mean, I know this guy works at least 14 hours a day, I bet he works closer to 16. I
mean, just hitting it.

Jesse: Do we have a plug for his pizza shop here?
Bob: I don’t know his … Hopefully, Hajiss, he’ll hook us up

with some pizza or whatever. But I
think we’ll be hearing a lot more from Hajiss and maybe we can help him out and bring
some of his progress on the show, and show everybody what we can do for him.

Jesse: Yeah, I think it’s pretty cool, and I think it’s surprising really. We thought we’d be doing
this for three or four months before people would even recognize that it’s out there.

Bob: Yeah.

Jesse: But I think this our, I don’t know, our third or fourth episode in a row that we’ve had a
review that will come in at the end here for people?

Bob: Yup.

Jesse: I think, at the time of recording this we’re up to ten reviews on there? Five star reviews
too. Just surprising. We’re putting this out there just to share with everybody and
people are responding and just telling us how it’s impacting their lives already, which is
kind of blowing us away. We hoped we might pick up a customer or two, or teach
people a few things, and just kind of get on the soap box.

Bob: Yeah. It’s fun.

Jesse: Super cool. So for all you guys, yeah, intrycks.com/iTunes. Jump on there, give us a
review. If you’re feeling the same way, it’s pretty easy to do. We really appreciate it. On
the one hand, of course, it helps give us exposure and everybody else can read what you
think about it. But personally, for Bob and I, it’s just awesome. We’re Minnesota nice,
right?

Bob: Right.

Jesse: We really appreciate it and, as you guys have seen, if you pay attention at the end of the
episodes, we read every single review that we’re getting. We try to one episode here.
But as long as you guys keep giving them, we’re going to keep reading them.

Bob: Yup.

Jesse: Well, that’s all we’ve got for this week. Stay tuned next week. And we’ll see you then.

Bob: See you.

Jesse: Hey, everyone, Jesse again. I wanted to make sure we get in a review for this week. This
week we got a nice review from Hajiss. And we actually mentioned him earlier in the
episode. He gave us a great five star review right after episode six. He says, “Straight to
the point and no fluff. I came across this show while looking for some fresh information
on local SEO, as I am in the process of starting a local digital marketing business here in
the Atlanta area. The information is fresh and actionable content. I hope it keeps
coming. I’ve been on all six episodes and can’t wait for the next one. Don’t forget to
check out the website for some useful tools including the free SEO audit. Priceless.
Thanks guys.”

You are absolutely right. Everybody listen, if you haven’t checked out the SEO audit yet,
go on out there on intrycks.com, check on the SEO audit button, takes about 15
seconds, you can plug in any page, whatever keyword you want to be optimized for and
it’s going to give you great information. It’s also going to email you the PDF to your
email address. So check that out. You can use it as many times as you want. Completely
free.

Also, wanted to loop back, we were talking about the call tracking. As I mentioned, kind
of midway through the episode, go to intrycks.com/calls if you want to sign up for the
Beta, we’d love to have you help us out. Give it all a test run, see how it works and,
obviously, you’re going to reap the rewards of it as well. So intrycks.com/calls. Stay
tuned in the future. It’s going to be a great product. We’re excited to launch that and
hopefully it’s going to help you guys out.

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RESOURCES

Note: some of the resources below may be affiliate links, meaning we get paid a commission (at no extra cost to you) if you use that link to make a purchase.

• Intrycks Call Tracking Software Solution
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