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Metro's Paul Hamilton has an interesting quote, "We needed an affordable way to bring this portfolio of capabilities to our advertisers to effectively compete against incumbents and pure play Internet companies calling on our customers." Read that last part again. Metro Directories is an innovative group that knows where the local markets are headed. They've recognized that their customers are going to get this service from somebody, so it makes sense to empower Metro's sales force to fill that need.
We've always been proactive in going after spam / robot calls. The problem seems to have gotten worse in the past few months (not just call measurement lines - I've noticed a lot of junk calls on my cell phone and work line as well). We're rolling out a couple of new features that will go a long way toward fixing the problem.
- Spam calls will be removed from reports
- Area codes / exchanges that have been identified as spammers will be strategically filtered, so customers won't have to deal with nuisance phone calls.
Original post
It's happening
This certainly isn't a bad idea for American Classifieds because it'll keep the sales team engaged with their advertisers. I just can't think of a similar situation where industries incidentally funded their greatest competition.
John Guhn, BDC Director (Business Development Center) at Texas Toyota, recently congratulated his sales team for a successful sales blitz after they surpassed his goal of 20,000 outbound phone calls for the month of July. Texas Toyota has been one of our top users of outbound call measurement since the day we debuted the service in early 2006. We asked John to tell us about their incredible month:
"Everything in our industry can be broken down to numbers: Demo percentage, Commitment percentage, Be-Back numbers, closing percentage, etc. It’s all a numbers game and making outbound phone calls is no different.”
“We’ve had Call Measurement in our store now for about two years, but we only reopened our BDC on June 3rd. At the end of June our owner made a remark about how we had never hit 20,000 CTI calls (an outbound call that’s picked up and lasts a minimum 45 seconds) in a month. After looking at our outbound calls and figuring out how many it took to generate a shown appointment (varied from 39 to 47 calls) as well as how many shown appointments it took to close a sale (at the time, 2 shown appointments usually equaled a sale) I decided to challenge the sales staff in July to hit 20,000.”
"To keep the momentum going, everyone was on a daily schedule of at least one call per hour in the BCD. The results for the entire sales force and management staff were posted every morning so they could see how they did compared to their fellow salespeople. They also came up with several different spiffs during the month to keep the team motivated."
"As they got close to the end of the month, it became obvious that they were going to hit the 20,000 with almost two days left. Instead of telling everyone they were going to hit the number early, signs were posted in the new and used car desk offices and the BDC saying, 20,000 by close of business July 31. I kept telling everyone we had a shot at hitting an all time record. Everyone seemed to get so motivated about hitting it that they stayed focused on dialing and setting appointments. When the number reached 19,828 at 11:34AM on Wednesday July 30, I changed the poster to 21,000 CTI Calls by Close of Business July 31."
“I kept telling everyone we were close to 20,000 and I thought with a little extra push we had a real chance at 21,000. By the time everyone quit dialing around 9:15PM on the 31st we had done 21,575 calls for the month. Oh, by the way, at the end of the month we averaged 40.6 CTI calls per shown appointment with a 47% closing rate for 249 sold appointments!”
“Before Century Interactive's Outbound Call Measurement service, there was no way to track our appointment setting process or our outbound call efforts. And there certainly was no way to set any meaningful goals that we could easily track. It's invaluable to instantly see an updated accounting of how many outbound calls are made every half hour, as well as being able to listen to the calls. We use these recordings for training purposes and to contact the customer back ASAP when we didn’t secure a phone number or if we completely blew a presentation.”
"What’s interesting is, like the first sub-4 minute mile that Roger Bannister ran in 1954, breaking 20,000 doesn’t seem like that big of a deal now. As of August 13, with one less work day in the month, Texas Toyota is on pace to hit 23,126 CTI calls at 43.1 calls-per-shown-appointment and a 52% close ratio. Now if we could just get our closing percentage on fresh ups to 25%, we’d have it made!”
Century Interactive designs innovative telephony services and then enthusiastically supports the valued customers who use them.
That sounds like a half-baked Corporate Mission Statement, but it's actually the motto I keep repeating as our company plans our growth strategy. There are three key elements in that statement:
"innovative telephony services" - we're separating ourselves from the pack with some of the new services and features that we've already added this year: enahnced outbound call measurement with recording, dynamic offline tracking tools for online marketing, telemarketing blockers, and more. Now we're ready to introduce real-time call analysis, virtual receptionist capabilities, personalized marketing extensions, and an expanded API library.
"enthusiastically supports" - the success we've had over the past 21 years is directly attributable to our unique approach to customer service. Rather than building a team of customer service middlemen, we allow our engineers, marketers, accountants, and executives to work directly with our clients on an ongoing basis. While this sounds great in theory, it's not a cost-efficient way to do business because it tends to tie up expensive resources. Regardless of the costs, though, we're committed to this approach and we've even decided to double-down by formally adding "customer service" to the job descriptions of every one of our employees.
"valued customers" - we've recently introduced some new tools for partners that resell Century Interactive's call measurement services. By offering a white-label invoicing program and advanced administrative tools, we're doing everything we can to help our partners expand their businesses. Obviously we have a self-interest in seeing these guys succeed, but we want to make it clear to our resellers that we're committed to our role as a wholesale partner. We're focused on empowering our partners, and the key component of our growth strategy is "Let's find a way to elevate our resellers and assist their businesses."
We'll be updating our centuryinteractive.com website during June and July. Beyond simply offering a new look, we're going to articulate our value proposition and introduce the new direction we think call measurement is headed. I'll use this blog to give some insight into the rationale behind some of these decisions. As always, thanks for your interest.
Peter Krasilovsky pointed out an interesting announcement from Local.com's recent earnings call on his Local Onliner blog:
- Local.com, which has previously relied on third party sales, is going direct in a big way. The company has outsourced contracts for 50 sales people, up from 10.
This means Local.com, Marchex, Idearc, Citysearch and countless others are footing the bill for a sales force to hit the streets and sell listings for their competitors. Local.com's guy will offer Joe the Plumber a package that gets him listed on Local.com plus Google, Yahoo, SuperPages, YellowPages.com and other sites. Then Citysearch's sales team will come through a week later and try to sell the same package.
Who's the big winner here? It's the big guys like Google, because the local advertisers will be more inclined to buy a package from Local.com if they know it will also get them some leads from Google. In the past I hypothesized that Google would ultimately need to partner up with YP publishers to reach micro-local advertisers (plumbers, gate repair companies, wedding planners, etc.). Now that's not the case - they're getting a free ride.
If I were running a small business that survived on local advertising, I'd be most interested in a relationship with someone who could get me listed on all of the right portals. The people at Marquette Group have figured this out in a major way - they're positioning themselves as the unbiased experts at sorting through all of the different online marketing options. Oozle Media also has the right idea - they're leveraging prior experience in YP / IYP advertising to work directly with advertisers as independent advisers and consultants.
I'm certainly not suggesting that Local.com and other IYP publishers are wrong to sell packaged listings...to the contrary, it seems to be the best strategy. I just think it's interesting how much the ad-sales model has changed in the past few years.
Earlier this week I spoke with a search marketing company that wants to provide call measurement services to its customers. It's a simple concept: clicks are already being measured, but a lot of advertisers want a better understanding of the value those clicks are bringing. For companies that are still conducting the majority of their transactions over the phone, it makes sense to evaluate clicks based on the number of phone calls they generate.
During the discussion, the search marketing rep asked if he should assign a unique call measurement number to every unique keyword term, or if it's sufficient to just use a different number for each campaign (a campaign typically contains multiple keywords that are related. Campaign = car repair, Keywords = fix car, body shop, car wreck, collision repair, etc.). I recommended using unique call measurement numbers (whether it's a whole number or an extension from a shared number or click-to-call) for each individual keyword term.
We're a fairly active advertisers on Google's AdWords program, and I put a lot of faith in their objective computers to bring us traffic. They're only getting paid when they entice someone to click on one of our sponsored ads, so I figured our goals were aligned. I even deferred to their system to create new word combinations that might benefit our company. We initially sponsored 100+ keyword terms and I never spent a lot of time studying results for the individual phrases / terms. A few months ago I was thumbing through our results and noticed that one of the top search terms bringing traffic to our site was "track my cell phone calls". We were paying about $30 a month for traffic that had no real value to our company. This wasn't a click fraud issue - those word match up closely to what we do, but someone searching for cell phone tracking isn't going to find anything useful on our website.
We don't really offer an online checkout system - if someone comes to our website, the ultimate goal is for the visitor to contact us (either by phone or email). Since we're now relating specific keyword terms to individual call reports, it's easy for me to see if there's a disconnect between the amount of traffic on our site and the number of calls/emails we receive. If a keyword term drives 200 new visitors to our site each month, but none of them end up calling us, I now know to adjust that specific keyword term (or in most cases, remove it from our list).