How to Accurately Measure the ROI of Phone Calls in Industrial Marketing

When it comes to measuring the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing activities, it’s essential that you’re actually measuring all of it. Thanks to the increasing prevalence of digital marketing, most marketers look at things like clicks, open rates and conversions. But if you’re like many industrial suppliers, you could be overlooking an essential piece of the marketing metrics puzzle — phone inquiries.

Why Should You Track Your Phone Calls?

The reality is that some buyers still prefer to call. While today’s B2B buyers tend to do their supplier discovery and evaluation anonymously online, when they’re ready to contact suppliers, they still lean toward doing it by phone. In fact, procurement leaders view supplier collaboration as one of their top priorities. Picking up the phone and having conversations with suppliers at the beginning of the bidding process establishes a great foundation for a healthy business relationship.

According to Thomasnet.com user data, three out of every five sales inquiries happen via phone as opposed to email. How do we know this? The ROI measurement tools we provide to our suppliers include our Call Tracking service — so our customers (and we) know exactly where their inquiries are happening.

You may be surprised to learn what else our Call Tracking reveals: industrial suppliers on average track less than 3 percent of their phone sales inquiries.

In other words, on 97 out of 100 incoming calls, the person answering the phone fails to ask “Where did you hear about us?” If you’re not asking this basic question, you’re not fully measuring the ROI of any of your marketing efforts.

Recommended Reading: "What Is ROI In Marketing [And How To Prove It]"

Two Ways Suppliers Can Track The ROI Of Their Phone Calls?

1. Ask Your Buyers How They Heard About Your Business

Simply asking callers, “Where did you hear about us” will give you a more holistic view of your marketing efforts, and will help you determine which channels are working in your favor. Online marketing metrics can help you interpret user behavior, but tracking your phone inquiries will help you understand that buyer behavior, which is more important for the bottom line of your business.

For more tips and insight on how to accurately and effectively measure your marketing ROI, check out our eBook, 4 Ways Industrial Marketers Short Circuit Their ROI.

2. Use ROI Tools To Better Track Your Leads

So how can you begin to get a clear and accurate picture of your pipeline of leads? Unfortunately, the ROI tools that most marketers rely on aren't going to get the job done.

• Analytics tools, like Google Analytics, can help you keep track of top-level metrics, such as visits and traffic numbers, but they won't give you the names of companies and buyers.
• Marketing automation platforms can be helpful in that they track the activity of known contacts. However, if an anonymous visitor is showing serious interest in your content, you won't be able to find out who they are.
• There are some solutions out there that can help you identify visitors by their IP addresses, but they tend to be expensive, and many companies mask their IP addresses for the sake of privacy.

If you keep relying on the same old tools, you'll keep running into the same old issue — missing leads and missed opportunities to grow your business. You simply need to know exactly who is visiting your website.

Thomas WebTrax can help you turn these anonymous visitors into measurable and actionable leads for your business. It is able to:

• Track buyers throughout their entire journey, from your website, to the Thomas Network, to an RFI or phone call.
• Identify the names of companies that are visiting your site and engaging with your content.
• Prioritize those buyers by filtering according to industry, geography, company size, revenue, and other firmographic details.
• Help you engage your buyers with more targeted and meaningful outreach communications, as your sales team will have access to their entire history of activity.

 

Get More Visibility, Win More Business

The industrial buying process is typically long and complicated. Between realizing the need for a product or service and actually purchasing that product or service, buyers have to work their way through 225 individual tasks. Most of these tasks — which focus around researching, designing, evaluating, and shortlisting — don't involve actually interacting with you at all.

These buyers can be very real, very serious, and very qualified leads for your business. The problem, of course, is that you have no way of knowing that they exist. With Thomas WebTrax, you can finally begin to identify all of the in-market buyers who are engaging with you online. Sign up for your free account today.