8 KPIs Call Centers need to Track on Salesforce to convert Outbound Operations into Revenue
5 min
Outbound activities are essential for the growth of any business. Reaching out to potential customers and making them aware of the product or service they offer hence generating more leads and nurturing them into a sale.
The outbound activity can be performed by a human agent or an automated system. Call center agents are usually more effective than a computerized system in generating leads because they provide a more personalized customer service.
What Does a Successful Outbound Sales Strategy Look Like?
The success of any outbound sales strategy depends on the quantity (of prospects, leads, agents, calls, channels) just as much as it depends on the quality of the service delivered by the rep team (which comes down to whether the prospect likes what they hear, can hear it properly and is ultimately encouraged to take action).
- What Does a Successful Outbound Sales Strategy Look Like?
- Curated Prospect List
- Healthy ROI
- Dials:Conversations and Conversations:Sold Ratios
- Use of SMS
- Measure, Improve, Repeat
- Efficiency focus
Call center technology has developed into the most diverse Features to Turbocharge Outbound Calling Strategy, which help optimize and improve the quality of their operations. Some others include gamification for team building and motivation.
Options are endless, and it’s always a good idea to start small, test out the strategy and then tweak or scale- whenever possible. So the following section will discuss five points to consider when evaluating an outbound sales strategy.
Curated Prospect List
Qualitative and quantitative KPIs are essential to detecting strategic risks and opportunities. Call centers have widely incorporated tech to identify and target the right leads, to determine what channels to use and how often to reach out. Once the prospect list has been curated, call center stack can help power through call lists on time and with resource efficiency. From managing all information with Salesforce CRM to performing an automatic call dialing session, call center technology can make a significant impact on the volume of connected prospects and revenue.
Healthy ROI
The success of an outbound sales campaign is measured just like any other investment: comparing results with the resources invested. In this case, the Outbound sales funnel would look like this:
Dials:Conversations and Conversations:Sold Ratio
At the top of the funnel, the total phone calls made by the sales representatives team, followed by the number of connected calls, and the number of qualified leads effectively generated. At the bottom of the funnel, qualified leads that make the purchase are the ones that convert to ‘’Closed-Won’’. A successful outbound campaign should have a high closing ratio to be considered a good investment.
Use of SMS
Modern Call Centers go beyond the classical phone call. Reaching out to leads and prospects via SMS can help you reach a larger audience. This is a good strategy for building awareness, and sending updates and promotions. Follow-ups and reminders are widely accepted via SMS.
Measure, Improve, Repeat
The success of an outbound sales campaign can be jeopardized by human and technical errors. By tracking the quality and volume of the outbound calls made by the rep team, improvements in scripts and good practices can be designed and implemented. A successful campaign should have a high number of phone calls per day, as well as succeed in converting a large portion of these phone calls into sales.
Efficiency
Normally Call Centers integrate their telephony system with their CRM to keep track of outbound calling activity. CTIs like PhoneIQ provide Salesforce-native reports and dashboards to track the time spent on each call, the number of calls made per day, what kind of call was made, SMS texts that were sent, etc. These tools also provide a detailed report on how many prospects were contacted and how many were converted into customers.
Salesforce provides an outbound activity dashboard that tracks all the phone calls made by a rep in one day. This dashboard helps track their progress over time so they know what they need to do more or less to get better results with their outbound activities.
8 KPIs Call Centers need to Track on Salesforce to convert Outbound Operations into revenue
To ensure a successful outbound sales strategy, there are some key performance indicators (KPIs) that need to be monitored regularly. These KPIs are:
- Total outbound calls dialed
- Total SMS messages sent
- Total conversations per agent per day
- The number of abandoned calls per agent per day
- Contact attempts per account
- Percentage of cold-call attempts made by agents in a week
- Revenue generated per caller hour
- Voicemail return rate by the customer
With so many metrics to track, it can be challenging to know which ones are most important for your business. This article will cover the seven outbound sales metrics that you should be tracking in Salesforce for your sales team and provides you with insights into their performance.
1- Total outbound calls dialed
This metric gives a snapshot of the number of outbound calls made by sales agents in a day. Contrasting this metric against Conversations per Agent per day is an excellent way to assess the quality of the database and how effective your outbound sales operations are.
The number of outbound calls made by agents, if linked well with the best time to call the customer, gives you an effectivity telesales campaign. Ultimately, it helps convert outbound leads with higher conversation rates and increase your revenue.
2- Total SMS messages sent
Omnichannel Call Centers also need to track messages being sent, as SMS are making a huge comeback for all sorts of functions: updates on delivery, invoicing details, reminders and promotions.
Statistics reveal that text and multimedia messages have a 97% open rate.
SMS and MMS messages sent from the Call Center’s computer-telephony integration are automatically logged into Salesforce. This information is vital to detect cost optimization opportunities. Click here to learn how integrating Salesforce Sales Cloud and SMS can Help You Increase Revenue
3- Total conversations per agent per day
As the number of calls placed increases, your team has more chances to succeed at engaging in conversations with prospects and clients, potentially generating new leads and closing deals. The total number of conversations made daily by your agents is a great indicator for campaign projections.
It is an important KPI for measuring the effectiveness of an outbound sales team and setting targets and tracking progress toward sales performance or customer service goals.
4- Number of abandoned calls per agent per day
An abandoned call is where the customer hangs up before reaching an agent for any reason, or those calls declined by an agent. The daily number of abandoned calls per agent is a metric used to measure the outbound activity at call centers.
Referred to as ‘Missed calls’ in Salesforce, the number of abandoned calls per agent tracked on daily basis is the ratio of ignored calls and total calls connected by the call center within 24 hours. Call center agents struggling to meet their quota can use this metric to understand better how they are performing and what they need to do to improve their performance.
5- Contact attempts per account
Contact attempts per account is a metric that measures the number of outbound phone calls a salesperson makes to each customer on their contact list.
When executing an ABM strategy in Salesforce, the number of contact attempts per account is measured. It calculates the number of contacts divided by the number of accounts in their contact list.
The higher this ratio, the more effective your outbound call center activity has generated new leads and sales opportunities for your company. This number should be monitored closely and compared with other metrics, such as conversion rates or average deal size, to see if there are any discrepancies between them.
6- Percentage of cold-call attempts made by agents
The percentage of cold-call attempts made by agents is a key metric for understanding the level of activity in the outbound call center.
In order to measure the success of this activity, we need to understand the percentage of cold-call attempts made by agents in a week. This metric helps managers to identify areas where they can improve the productivity and skill set of their agents.
Agents usually make between 35 and 70 cold calls every week at a success rate of 82% according to prospecting research outcomes by the RAIN Group.
7- Revenue generated per caller hour
The average revenue generated per call hour, or ACRPH, is a standard metric for measuring the productivity of an outbound call center.
- The revenue per call hour is calculated in two ways:
- Average revenue per call hour = Total Revenue / Total Call Hours
- Average revenue per hour = Total Revenue / Hours Spent on Calls
It is essential to track this metric to determine how much money is generated per hour for each agent who works in an outbound sales team.
8- Voicemail return rate by the customer
The voicemail return rate is a metric that measures the percentage of calls where the customer is returning a call after a rep left them a voice message. This metric which is available in the Salesforce Outbound Activity Report can be monitored to see how well your call center is doing with their outbound activity.
Why is this metric important? Nearly 52% of all business calls end up going to voicemail, but only the very interested prospects do call back.
Modern Call Centers know the benefits of using voicemail drop in Salesforce to increase their prospecting success rate, leveraging telephony features to make the best out of this situation.
Every Call Center campaign has its individual challenges and potential return. Make sure you follow these KPIs closely and add any additional KPIs that shed light on your operative outcomes.