Why Your MSP Desperately Needs Call Tracking

I’m continually impressed by the number of phone issues that can be uncovered by in an MSP business, when their core business revolves primarily around customers calling in for help with support issues. My suspicion is that those issues are never going away for their customers so if they for some reason can’t reach the MSP, they will call back. When it comes to sales prospects though, you can assume you’ve got one chance to pick up the phone or they are gone forever. Considering MSP customers can have values of $300,000 and often times much more, you’re missing 300k phone calls when you miss a sales prospects call. Is that something you can afford to ignore? Many MSP customers are switching from another “MSP” and when they get to the point of frustration that they’re ready to pick up the phone and start calling around for other options you can bet that one of the first things they are looking for is, “will this company pick up the phone when I call?”. If the answer is no, then it’s going to be tough to build trust from there. In this post, I’ll break down what call tracking software is and why it can be a big boost to your MSP’s marketing and sales efforts.

What Is Call Tracking Software

Call tracking software is 3rd party software that allows you to create forwarding numbers that act as a tracking layer between people calling your MSP, and reaching your company’s actual phone number. This tracking layer allows you to record phone calls, build call flows, listen to calls and tag them with various dispositions. We currently use CallRail for call tracking software and install it as part of our standard offering when we bring on a new MSP marketing client.

Eliminating Call Friction With Call Tracking Software

Call tracking software can help you eliminate a lot of friction in your sales prospects’ call experience. You don’t want high-value sales prospects going to your after-hours emergency support message because they called at 5:05 PM. Here are some common issues I see with MSPs after implementing call-tracking software that helps them generate and close more deals:

• They optimize their call flows for support instead of sales
• They don’t pick up the phone and miss a lot of calls
• They have issues with their IVR that creates endless loops for calls, causing people to hangup
• Press 2 for sales goes to someone’s number that doesn’t even work there anymore
• They send sales prospects to a dispatcher or receptionist instead of a salesperson
• They don’t train their dispatchers or receptionists on how to pass off a call to sales
• Etc

I’ve seen these issues after implementing call tracking for multiple MSPs, and I have also called larger high-volume MSPs that I respect to see what they are doing with their call experiences and they have implemented changes that are synonymous with the theme of “eliminating call friction”.

Marketing Benefits Of Call Tracking Software

One of the benefits of Call tracking software is its integration capability with other popular marketing tools like web analytics, CRMs, and advertising platforms. You can use these integrations to get a much better handle on where ROI is coming from and how to add more velocity to your pipeline. This is difficult, if not impossible to do with simple number-of-call type statistics. Call tracking software helps you figure out that “we drove 3 customers worth 1 million in revenue in Q1 from paid search and 1 customer worth 300k from SEO”. You can’t do this without knowing which of the 100 calls you received were from qualified leads that turned into customers. Adding call-tracking software to the mix allows you to get this level of visibility.

Sales Benefits Of Call Tracking Software

For smaller MSPs I have seen the primary benefits of call tracking software realized through cleaning up their sales efforts. The benefit of having call recordings from sales calls is that you can go through and listen to the call and do a post-mortem on the call to help improve the quality of a sales experience and move more prospects down the funnel. The difference between my most successful customers and my least successful ones is their ability to close leads. Soft skills are typically not a strong point for MSP owners and closing leads that come in from marketing efforts is much harder than a warm referral so you need to improve your soft skills from start to finish to create a positive sales experience that results in prospects signing on the dotted line.

The Key Takeaways

Call tracking software is relatively inexpensive to get started with and the benefits of leveraging it in your marketing stack far outweigh the costs. It can help connect the dots in your marketing efforts with the robust integration capabilities of major providers. It can help you eliminate call friction points that plague most MSPs and cause them to miss a significant amount of calls or cause prospects to drop off before ever reaching sales. When they do make it to sales, analyzing sales calls to get a better understanding of opportunities for coaching or improvement can be a key driver of down-funnel metrics like revenue generated and deals closed.

Are you searching to improve your MSP’s marketing and sales efforts? Tortoise and Hare can help you implement the marketing infrastructure you need and to execute on key channels like paid search to generate more qualified leads. Reach out today and schedule a free consultation.