What is call analytics: how to use data to drive sales performance

Great sales leaders know that calls aren’t just about relationship building: they’re a vital source of valuable insights into customer needs, rep performance, and team growth opportunities. Making the most of these insights before, during, and after your calls equips you to exceed customer expectations.

From sales teams that offer custom quotes, to marketing departments that want product messaging insights, call analytics technology helps your entire go-to-market team improve crucial customer conversations. An effective call analytics tool prepares you in advance, with relevant insights about the attendees, notes from past calls, and strategic guidance for future contact.

Understanding call analytics and its benefits is vital to choosing a best-in-class solution: one that doesn’t just transcribe your calls or give you static data, but actually provides intelligence during the conversation and automates insightful summaries after. That’s exactly the type of call analytics solution we use at Outreach — keep reading to learn more.

What is Call Analytics?

Call analytics is the sales and marketing tactic of collecting and measuring call tracking and recording data for analysis. Sales and marketing teams can use the learnings from call analytics to drive initiatives and leverage calls as a primary source of quality leads.

Because call analytics is also a technology, it automates key elements of tracking and reporting. This makes it easier for teams to assess performance against industry benchmarks, identify gaps in their methodology, and pivot their strategies as necessary. Since call analytics technology presents data visually, typically using customizable dashboards and charts for easy consumption, it’s vital that the intelligence gathered is comprehensive.

What Type of Data Does Call Analytics Software Collect?

Call analytics data yields valuable insights for marketing and sales teams, drawn from KPIs including:

• Lead score
• Call and hold time duration
• General caller ID information
• Detailed transcriptions
• Relevant keywords
• Marketing channel metrics
• Buyer sentiment analysis

The next generation of call analytics tools adds an interactive layer that empowers sales reps to leverage call analytics in real-time, instead of just retroactively. These new features include:

• Live call transcription
• Artificial intelligence that listens for keywords during the call and provides on-cue information for reps
• Automatic logging of action items and tasks into your SEP
• The ability to bookmark key moments during the call to revisit later

How Does Call Tracking Analytics Work?

So, how does all this data get aggregated?

For traditional call analytics, data collection is initially powered by call tracking. Assigned tracking numbers forward calls and collect relevant caller data. Call tracking technology also gathers attribution data, which can be as broad as referencing the source of a call to an overall marketing campaign, or as nuanced as identifying whether the call is the result of paid or organic web traffic from a single landing page within that campaign’s web content. Next, automated transcription services are engaged to record calls so that they can be analyzed. Artificial intelligence plays a critical role in keeping this process efficient, scanning the transcript for relevant cues and keywords to accurately score the lead.

Suppose your marketing team creates a microsite to promote a new product. The microsite includes a set of landing pages and a free download, each with their own link to call for a free demo. The marketing department promotes the microsite launch with a series of blog and social media posts as well as paid ads across a variety of channels. Call analytics will identify not only which landing page or download generated the lead, but how that lead found the microsite to begin with. It can even pinpoint whether paid or organic search drove prospects to the site, or whether they found it via a social media post, for example.

With sophisticated insights into how the target audience learns about and builds interest in the new product offering, your sales reps can more effectively strategize optimal follow-up with prospective customers. This means that phone calls are still your most powerful lead driver in sales conversions. One study found that call analytics empowered top performers to make 82% more calls and send 26% fewer emails across 40,000 deals. This unique data is why stakeholders in a variety of sales and marketing roles rely on call analytics to determine demographics, identify customer product interests, and organize and prioritize leads.

The Benefits of Sales Call Analytics

There are measurable sales and marketing advantages for revenue leaders who effectively implement call analytics across their organizations. Considering that call analytics provides sophisticated attribution and robust data gathering capabilities, there are abundant opportunities to leverage next-generation call analytics to achieve ROI.

Marketing benefits:

• Maximize your marketing budget: Call analytics helps you pinpoint what truly works, so you can continue to invest in the most effective marketing strategies and eliminate tactics that drive up cost per lead. By listening to what customers and prospects say on calls, you can uncover deep information about their biggest pain points.
• Capture leads with keywords: Modern call analytics is now nuanced enough to trace a lead back to keyword level data within marketing campaigns. Marketers can then create content around the most searched topics (improving ranking and visibility), optimize digital assets for relevant keywords, and reach niche audiences confidently with campaigns that speak to unique pain points.

Sales benefits:

• Design an evidence-based sales strategy: Successful inbound sellers rely on call analytics to understand customer pain points so that they can provide real-time recommendations for the solutions they need. Leveraging data to effectively coach sales reps during live sales calls keeps conversations on track to direct customers through the funnel, and yields buyer sentiment insights for future calls.
• Provide sophisticated customer personalization: The next generation of call analytics provides a greater level of insight about individual customers, empowering sales reps to tailor unique interactions with elegant product solution recommendations.

A high level of accuracy is critical when it comes to generating useful keyword lists from call transcriptions. AI that poorly transcribes or reports a phone conversation will miss critical terminology that directly impacts lead viability and customer experience. Optimal call analytics software integrates with other lead capturing platforms such as Salesforce, Google Analytics, and social media analytics services, uniting stakeholders around a single source of truth and nurturing a seamless customer experience.

At Outreach, we rely on next-generation call analytics to go beyond the foundational data that most analytics yield. Our call analytics tools include live call transcription, and AI that listens for keywords and pulls up relevant information during the conversation. We leverage call analytics to log action items and tasks into Outreach automatically, and bookmark key moments in conversations to revisit later.

Find the Best Call Analytics Software for Your Business

Consider your team and company’s specific needs when choosing call analytics software. For example, are your reps losing valuable time to call prep and research, or laboring over manually producing follow-up emails or answering unexpected questions that came up during a call? What’s the size of your team and what do their typical workflows look like?

At Outreach, we use Kaia, the real-time call AI assistant. Kaia streamlines our entire process from prep to follow-up. Our sales reps have cut their follow-up time by up to 67%, using next generation call analytics features that you won’t find anywhere else.

Kaia is an AI-powered virtual assistant that joins live meetings, captures real-time transcription, and delivers on-demand confidence with competitive and product details in the moment. With the addition of notes and bookmarks, reps stay focused on the customer, while Kaia automatically tracks action items and sends meeting summaries after the call. Talk analytics gives reps real-time guidance into participants’ engagement during the meeting — including when to stop talking and start listening. After the meeting, Kaia allows you to search and spot key signals from video and voice calls to help drive deals forward. Customers who use Kaia have reported productivity increases of up to 30%.

If this sounds like what you need for your team, sign up for a free Kaia demo today and discover how innovative customer engagement software can empower your sales team.