Phone Lead Scoring: What It Is & Why You Need It

Some of our call analytics competitors claim they offer lead scoring for phone calls.

The truth is they don’t have lead scoring. Some call tracking providers use other features to attempt lead scoring and mimic the advanced call analytic.

And, until we launched Conversation Analytics^®, we didn’t either. This blog post will keep you from being fooled by lead scoring pretenders.

What Lead Scoring Isn’t

Some call tracking companies seem to be confusing an IVR with actual lead scoring. I’m sure it’s an honest mistake.

They argue that an IVR (that thing where you can push 1 for sales, 2 for customer service, 3 for billing questions) basically can function as lead scoring because only ‘good’ leads push 1 for sales. Thus, it self-selective lead scoring.

Hmmmm….

Lead scoring and an IVR are two very different things. An IVR is NOT lead scoring. It’s…an IVR. That’s all.

Also, Convirza offers an IVR as well.

What Lead Scoring Is

Lead scoring is looking for, and assigning values to, cues from the lead that would indicator interest in purchasing.

Companies like Hubspot, Marketo provide lead scoring for online leads. For example, Hubspot will calculate a lead score based on the interaction a lead has with a website or content. It could give 100 points to someone if they visit your pricing page, 25 points to someone if they download a White Paper, 15 points if they open an email, 10 points if they click through from an email, etc. etc.

Convirza’s Conversation Analytics^® works in a similar way. It provides actual lead scoring for phone calls. Conversation Analytics^® analyzes the words spoken on every call with speech recognition technology and then runs the content through hundreds of simultaneously working algorithms.

Every call is scored for lead quality based on the actual words and phrases the caller used on the call.

So, if a caller uses the phase ‘I’m going to need a new car insurance policy in the next 30 days or so’, that caller would be a better lead than the caller who said ‘I won’t need new car insurance for 6 months.’ (Even though they both pushed 1 on the IVR).

Or, if a caller says he’ll come into a tire shop tomorrow afternoon at 2:00, he would be a better lead than another caller that didn’t agree to come in.

Long story short: Convirza’s Conversation Analytics^® provides lead scoring for phone calls based on the words the caller says on the phone.

A IVR is NOT phone lead scoring. Conversation Analytics^® is.

So what elements are included in the phone lead scoring provided by Convirza?

While I won’t give you the entire recipe for our lead scoring secret sauce, I will provide a few hints.

First, it is important to note that we don’t believe duration—by itself—is a good indicator of lead quality. There are simply other far more important things that happen on the phone that are better indicators of lead quality. However, duration is an indication of lead quality. So, while we rip on duration as a standalone indicator of lead quality (because it is dumb), we don’t want to disparage the value of duration when used in concert with other metrics.

So, with that in mind, here are some of the factors we use to determine the lead quality of a phone call.

Lead Quality Indicators

– Duration: How long is the customer interaction? A call that is 8 seconds long is not very likely to be a good lead. Duration is an element of our lead score algorithm. We take it into account when calculating a total lead score for a phone call.

– Sales Inquiry: Was the caller actually interested in buying the product or service that you are selling? Were they asking specific questions about the product or service? These are factors that help the system determine whether or not the caller was a legitimate sales inquiry vs. someone that called simply asking questions for informational purposes.

– Price Request: In many industries, callers will ask about price, while not being very close to actually buying something. This is called ‘price checking.’ It is common in the automotive and travel industries. Someone may call a tire shop and ask about price…and nothing else. Then they call a competitor and ask about price…and nothing else. This caller is a good lead, but not a great lead. They would receive some additional points on their lead score, but not as much as someone who asked several questions about the product, the price, the use, etc.

– Depth of Sales Process: How far into the sales process did the caller get? Was the agent able to set an appointment or a follow-up call? Was the agent even able to ask the question? Were they able to have a two-way conversation on the call? The more in-depth the conversation, the better the lead. This is a BIG part of the metric.

– Caller Sentiment: In addition to extracting data from the word and phrases said on the call, Conversation Analytics^® from Convirza can also extract data from the way the caller sounded on the call. Did they sound excited, angry, or disinterested? Excited callers generally buy things. Disinterested callers generally don’t. These factors—regardless of how small they may appear—matter a great deal when determining the lead quality of a caller.

– Objection Language: If the employee or agent asks the caller a question on the phone, what is the reaction? We all know objection language when we hear it. Things like: “Let me call around first,” or “I don’t think I’m ready to move forward yet,” are all indicators of a good lead but not a great lead.

– Negative Emotions: Was the caller angry or upset? Did they become more angry or upset as the call progressed? These are significant factors in the lead quality score of the phone call.

– Buying Signals: Did the caller send signals—based on the words and phrases said on the call—that he is ready to buy? Or, did he, in fact, buy something. Obviously, this is the most substantial element of lead quality.

– Personal Information: Our data shows that when a caller is willing to provide personal information, they are a better lead. And the more personal information they are willing to supply, the better lead they are. For example, if you get a name and an email address from a caller, they’re a pretty darn good lead.

The Significance of Lead Score

Okay, lead score is great, but why does it actually matter?  Does a higher lead score actually produce more revenue?

Well, yes, actually.

We analyzed a subset of 5,000 calls across a variety of industries. And here’s what we found:

Lead Score	Conversion Rate %
0-19	0%
20-29	0%
30-39	4%
40-49	21%
50-59	41%
60-69	67%
70-79	72%
80-89	97%
90-100	100%

This data is nothing short of mind-blowing. If you can consistently generate leads that have a lead quality score of 70 or more, you’ll close over 72% of the calls generated by your marketing.

In short: this is why lead score matters.

Use Cases for Phone Lead Scoring

There are dozens and dozens of use cases for phone lead scoring.

There are many clients that are starting to implement elements that we didn’t even think of. But they all—pretty much—boil down to one overarching idea: determine campaign/channel/keyword/ad value by the quality of phone calls generated. In other words, are calls coming from AdWords Campaign A producing higher quality calls than those coming from AdWords Campaign B? That’s at the root of phone call lead scoring.

With that in mind, here are several use cases:

– High-Level Channel Comparison: You are marketing via some online and offline channels. How do you know which is better? For example, direct mail is producing 100 calls per month and AdWords is producing 80. On the surface—that is, with basic call tracking—it would appear that direct mail is more effective. However when we dig deeper we find that the average lead score for direct mail phone calls is 54, and the average lead score for AdWords phone calls is 82. Obviously AdWords is producing better phone calls than direct mail.

– In-Depth Comparison of Ads: Compare phone lead quality for specific ads, keyword groups, and even landing pages for your AdWords campaigns.

– Sales Evaluation: We have clients that are judging sales team performance based on call lead quality metrics. How? Well, if you know that calls with an average lead score of 82 should be closing about 97% of time, you can use that as a benchmark and judge individual sales reps, entire departments, divisions, or locations.

– Bid Management: This might be the most powerful way to use the lead scoring functionality. If you are spending $20K per month on AdWords, you are likely using a bid management system like Acquisio, DoubleClick or Marin. These tools allow you to automatically assign rules to your bidding process. For example, if a conversion rate or a CTR is really high for a specific ad group, you can automatically increase your bid for that specific keyword, or ad, by 10% (or whatever).

Now these tools have integrated Conversation Analytics data into their bidding automation platform. So, when a certain ad produces calls with a lead score over a threshold you set (say 70), you can then automatically increase your bid by 15%.

– CRM: By matching phone numbers in a CRM to a phone number in Convirza, lead scores can be automatically appended to the customer record within the CRM itself. For example, if a repeat caller has a lead score of 82, that lead score can be automatically added as a field within your CRM. If the record doesn’t exist in the CRM already (a new caller), the information can be added and a prospect record created.

– Pay-Per-Call: The most obvious use case for phone lead scoring in the affiliate and pay-per-call world. Currently most lead buyers are paying for phone calls based on a faulty metric: call duration. Lead generators assign a specific dollar value to a phone call dependent exclusively on how long that call is. Our message is simple: that’s dumb. There are far better ways to determine the relative lead quality of a phone call. The best way: with a precise lead score from 0-100 based on what actually happened on the call.

It is impossible to overstate the impact of having a 0-100 lead score for phone calls that is based on the words and phrases actually said on the call. This metric provides a significant amount of value in evaluating the effectiveness of campaigns, affiliates and bidding strategy.

The future of lead scoring is here.