Most businesses that engage in outbound sales calls (whether internally, or outsourcing the sales calls) follow a process that goes something like this:
- Source data from which to make the calls (e.g. company name, person name, phone number).
- Create a script to work from.
- Make the calls.
- Follow up the calls.
- Follow up again.
- … and so on.
The A1WebStats system provides something extra that can gain you more from your outbound sales calls – the ability to identify if that call recipient comes back to your website in the future.
When someone makes an outbound sales call, they may refer to the business name, and ideally want to get to the next stage in the sales process. They are seeking a form of engagement without the call recipient feeling as if they’re being sold to.
Most sales calls will result in nothing.
Some sales calls provide the opportunity for engagement. It’s these calls that can help you via the A1WebStats system.
Picture this scenario:
- You have a list of people to ring. They all share something in common (e.g. they are a particular type of business that would potentially be interested in a specific service or product that you offer).
- Your website has a page that has been set up so that it’s highly visible in Google search results, and is highly relevant to the people receiving the sales call. For example, if selling red widgets, it could be a page showing the pros AND cons of red widgets vs blue widgets.
- Having gained some rapport with the sales call recipient, you tell them that you have a website page that will potentially be of interest to them. In the red widgets example, you could say something like: “I’ve got something that I believe will be very interesting to you – it’s a comparison of the pros AND cons of red widgets when compared to blue widgets – including examples of when red widgets aren’t the best choice”. Can I just get you to type ‘red widgets comparison’ into Google to show you the page?”.
- Having ensured that your company website page comes up prominently under the chosen search phrase, and sometimes with an extra “can you see our page top of the Google results?” prompt, the desired outcome is for the call recipient to click on the link.
- Leave that page of useful content with them and complete any further dialogue at this stage. It may be sufficient just to have reached out to them, provided something of value to them, and then agree to contact them again in the future (or for them to contact you).
- If they’ve gone to that page of the company website then you can see their visit within the A1WebStats system. You’ll know it’s them because you’ll see them enter your website at the time you had the conversation.
- What you’ll see is either their company details within that visit (in which case you need take no more action, as you’ll see if that company comes back to the website in the future), or there will be nothing useful in the ‘Organisation’ part of their visit. But that will soon change …
- Not all companies are identifiable by their IP address (as explained in our guide here) but you now know that the person on the phone is the visitor you’re looking at within the A1WebStats system. And you want to be able to easily identify them when they come back to the website in the future (which they may do).
- Click on the ‘Edit’ option within their visit data and change the Organisation Name to the one that you know it is. Optionally, you can enter their telephone and website details if you want to (it depends on how much time you have). When you save the record it will update your business view of that IP address as being linked to the organisation name that you’ve entered, which makes it easy to identify them if they return to the website in the future.
Whether it’s internal or external, whether the sales call recipient can be identified as a company, or not, the A1WebStats system (and a slightly different approach to the structure of sales calls) will help you to see when that company comes back to your website in the future.
And just to make extra sure that they do come back to your website, having clicked through to it, you are of course using Google Remarketing so that your business adverts then ‘follow’ those visitors for weeks or months after their initial visit?