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Driving revenue growth requires tight alignment between marketing and contact center sales teams. If marketing and contact center teams don’t work in concert, it can cause a host of issues that hinder revenue growth.
However, many companies miss the mark when it comes to marketing and sales collaboration. In our recent study, we learned that while 9 in 10 believe that marketing and sales alignment is important for driving revenue, only 1 in 10 say their teams are strongly aligned.
So, how can you ensure your teams are closely aligned? It starts with having the right KPIs in place to guide your shared strategy. Obviously, revenue is the most important metric, but there are several guideposts you should follow along the way to reach that ultimate destination.
In this post, we’ll break down the KPIs marketing and sales teams need to measure to create a cohesive, revenue-focused strategy. Keep reading to learn more!
While most marketers have online lead tracking down pat, many overlook the phone calls their campaigns drive. This causes them to significantly underreport their impact on the bottom line, as callers are often the most valuable conversions. Research shows they spend more, convert faster, and stay more loyal than online leads.
That’s why many of the KPIs in this section are phone call-related — tracking and optimizing for these often-overlooked metrics can significantly impact revenue generation.
When tracking the phone calls your marketing efforts drive, the first metric to watch is phone call answer rate. This is a prerequisite because if you’re spending budget driving phone leads that don’t get picked up at the contact center, you’re flushing your budget down the drain.
When you use a solution like Invoca to get granular data about call answer rates at each of your business or contact center locations, you can collaborate with your sales team to correct issues. This ensures the valuable phone leads you drive are connected to sales at a high rate.
The next phone call-related metric marketers should measure is their lead per call rate. Many call tracking solutions simply report that a phone call was driven by a particular marketing source — they don’t give any insights about if that call was a lead or a non-sales-related inquiry. In other cases, the call tracking tool may use call duration as a proxy for lead quality, but this isn’t accurate either — the length of a call isn’t necessarily indicative of its quality.
To truly understand how many phone leads your campaigns drive, you need an AI-powered solution that captures insights from each conversation. This allows you to understand which phone calls were truly leads and which were non-sales-related inquiries. With this data, you can adjust your bidding strategy to drive more high-value calls at a lower cost.
Tracking phone leads alone isn’t enough — to understand the full impact of your marketing investments on the bottom line, you need to show your leadership team the money. Solutions like Invoca allow you to easily train AI models to identify lead intent, if they converted to a customer, and how much revenue was generated. These insights allow you to prove your full impact on business results and further optimize your bidding strategy.
Oftentimes, marketing teams become consumed by early-funnel metrics like click-through rates, ad engagement, and lead volume. Sure, these are good benchmarks to get a general gauge of campaign performance, but they don’t give you any insight into how well your efforts contribute to revenue.
Metrics like return on ad spend (ROAS) and return on investment (ROI), on the other hand, are better indicators of bottom-line performance. Return on ad spend (ROAS) is a marketing metric that measures the revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. Return on investment (ROI) measures the return or gain from an investment relative to its cost.
If you track the phone call metrics we listed above, you can calculate your full ROAS and ROI. Callers are often your most valuable customers — they’re highly motivated to buy and are looking to connect with one of your sales agents as soon as possible. If you leave them out of your reporting, you’re likely underreporting your ROAS and ROI.
Cost per acquisition (CPA) is a marketing metric that measures the cost of acquiring a customer or achieving a specific conversion goal, such as a sale, appointment, or quote. CPA is often used to determine how much a company spends to gain new customers or achieve desired actions.
Many companies fail to incorporate phone lead data into their CPA calculations and as a result, their cost per acquisition is artificially high. This makes it harder for marketers to defend their budgets from getting slashed.
To drive revenue, contact center teams need to efficiently handle and convert the phone leads marketing sends. But this is easier said than done, as today’s customers have higher experience expectations than ever — they demand seamless online-to-offline journeys and personalization at every turn. By optimizing for the metrics below, you can ensure your contact center delivers stand-out experiences that drive revenue and lasting loyalty.
The most urgent contact center metric to address is unanswered call rate. To convert leads to customers, you first must ensure your agents and locations are answering the phones. You may scoff and say, “I know my contact center is picking up the phones,” but you’re probably missing more calls than you think. According to Invoca platform data, companies miss, on average, 26% of their inbound calls. This drains marketing budgets and drives down revenue.
As we mentioned earlier, revenue execution solutions like Invoca give you deep reporting into call answer rates at each location and contact center. You can use this data to identify patterns that lead to unanswered calls and staff appropriately to handle peak times.
The average speed of answer (ASA) is a contact center metric used to measure the average amount of time it takes for an agent to answer incoming calls. Optimizing for ASA has a direct correlation with revenue — our study found that 59% of callers hang up after waiting ten minutes on hold. In addition, lowering your ASA can build brand loyalty, as many companies understaff their contact centers and force their customers to endure long hold times.
If you use a revenue execution solution like Invoca, you can use tools like intelligent call routing to improve your average speed of answer. Invoca uses information from each caller’s digital journey before the call — such as the digital ads or webpages they interacted with — to route them to the best available agent to handle their inquiry. High-intent calls can be routed to priority queues and low-intent calls can be directed to online or automated resources.
In our study, a shocking 76% of customers said they’d stop doing business with a company after a single bad experience. To build lasting loyalty and encourage repeat purchases, your brand needs to deliver seamless experiences. That’s why you should track CSAT and NET promoter score — these metrics gauge customer satisfaction with your brand.
CSAT or customer satisfaction (CSAT) score measures the level of satisfaction customers receive during their interactions — it is typically measured via surveys, where customers rate their experience on a scale of one to five. Similarly, net promoter score (NPS) rates customers’ likelihood to recommend a company’s services to others on a scale of -100 to +100.
This is another area where a revenue execution platform can play a role, as Invoca offers a feature called PreSense. Before each call is connected, PreSense automatically gives the contact center agent a screenpop showing the caller’s information, such as their name, purchase history, and the web pages they visited before calling. The agent can use this information to greet the caller like a VIP and jump into the conversation with all the necessary context. This level of personalization builds loyalty by making customers feel valued and known.
To ensure your agents are handling calls efficiently and following the right scripts, you should regularly do quality assurance. This process involves listening to and scoring calls based on your organization’s criteria — for instance, you may want them to use a standard greeting, mention a promotion, express empathy, and ask for the sale. As a result, you can identify your agents’ strengths and weaknesses, and give them the right coaching to close more deals.
Many contact center managers, however, run into an issue — they don’t have the bandwidth to score enough calls for accurate and timely quality assurance. This can lead to sampling bias and can make it difficult for them to give their team the right coaching. To solve this all-too-common problem, companies use Invoca’s automated quality assurance. Invoca uses an easily trainable AI model to score 100% of your agents’ calls according to your company’s unique criteria.
This is the big one! Contact center close rate measures the percentage of phone leads converted to a sale, appointment, or other desired outcome. Close rate directly impacts revenue generation, and therefore is one of the most important KPIs for any call center.
Revenue execution platforms are AI-powered solutions that connect the entire customer buying journey. They work by bridging the data gap between the marketing team that engages customers and the sales teams that close the deals. This creates a cohesive view of the revenue journey for interactions that take place online and conversion actions that happen over the phone.
When you use a revenue execution platform like Invoca, you can track and optimize for all the metrics we mentioned above. You can also enhance the buyer journey with tools like intelligent routing and PreSense. As a result, you can take the right steps to drive high-quality leads, convert those leads at a higher rate, and build customer loyalty.
Want to learn more about how Invoca can help you build a revenue-focused business strategy? Check out these resources:
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