Most of the companies that we have come across in our business do not have an effective lead management system in place to identify the outcome of each lead. Many well meaning managers have the receptionist or the sales person putting tick marks on a sheet to identify the lead source. The question that must linger in their minds is the accuracy of the count. Imagine if just one or two calls in ten go unrecorded.

The challenge with this system is in the people. Your team wants to do a good job. They want to get the prospect to someone who can help or in the sales persons case they want to turn a prospect into a sale. In many cases the speed at which the calls are comming in dictate the quality of the tracking. Additonal pressure comes with the end of the month close cycle and the overall work load in the office. Ultimately, the owner or sales manager has little idea of the true volume of traffic derived from a lead source and if this is true no idea of the value of the business that was lost.

At www.capturethecall.com we have incorporated a contact management program into our call tracking system. With this system our software will automatically capture all calls from all advertising sources that ring into your office from ads that have our tracking numbers in them. You will have 100% knowledge of every lead that responds to any ad.

Once in our software the lead can be tracked in real time. The contact manager will show you the date of the first call, the time, how many times we have talked to this prospect and the notes of each call. The system will capture important data on the caller such as their name, address and phone number. Better yet you can export all of this data to another contact management program such as ACT, Goldmine or Outlook with the touch of a button. With our export tool you can eliminate the need to have the sales team load their own caller data.

Now that we have a technology that will show us who all the callers are we need a tool that will let us know what happened to each call. Enter the Answer Center. Our advanced software will take sales tracking to the next level. This program actually closes the sales cycle in real time. Sales managers and owners can see lead progress in immediately. The system will even identify opportunities that have been lost as they occur, it will notify the sales manager responsible the the lead is going badly and visually highlight that lead on our call report in bright red. By making the lead jump out all management has to do is glance at the call report to see the status of the lead program. Obviously, the faster you know about lost opportunities that more effectively you can mount an approach to go back after that prospect before they have a chance to make their purchase from another source.

At the end of the day our program will allow you to know every caller, who they talked to, how many times, the vale of the opportunity and if we ended up making the sale. All of this information can then be exported to an Excell Spread sheet to place a total dollar value on the opportunities your ad program generated and the true results of what was sold. By taking the total sales minus the cost of the advertising that you are doing you will finally be able to establish a true return on investment number. You will know, for sure, who in your staff can sell and what ad programs pay for themselves. By eliminating bad ad programs and poor sales people you can maximize every dollar.

As the new year begins everyone is launching updated marketing programs they have budgeted. Yellow Pages, direct mail, TV, Radio Spots, Newspapers, magazines, billboards all SUPPOSED to generate prospects and hopefully more sales. At the end of the day how do you know if they worked or how much they really made you?

In our experience many companies have the receptionist or the sales person ask where the prospect heard of the company. (Trying to quantify which ad works the best) My question to all of you is "what do you say when they ask you?". Most of us agree with what ever the person on the other end of the phone says, just to be polite. That is why it is critical to include a call tracking service in all of your advertising campaigns. You can finally identify which ad vehicles work and which ones are duds. Plus you can reduce the workload on people who are usually over worked all ready. Once listed as a dud you can cancel underperforming advertising for good and reallocate those dollars to an ad sources that produces. Doing so reduces your actual ad budget while INCREASING your lead productivity. Very cool!

Here is one idea that does work well. Offer a cruise as an incentive to do business with you.

Lets face it ~ All of us have competition. Many competitiors use an approach that is similar to yours in the market. This is especially true if you are the most successful in a market. Our goal was to come up with ideas that seperate us from the others but do so in a way that does not break the bank.

Here at Capture the Call our technology will be able to tell you who the people are that respond to your ads. It will tell you the geographics, demographics as well as the phone number of the callers. With this data you can approach the caller in a way that is different than the competition thereby differentiating yourself from them.

With the tracking data captured, integrate Cruise Incentives to differentiate yourself from your competition. These offers provide sales people with ice breakers that give us all something different to talk about as we open a dialogue with a prospect. Interestingly the incentives only cost $100 and yet your customer will perceive a value in the thousands and that really get peoples attention.

Fortunately for us we have become distributors of these and several other incentives options and so can use them to our benefit. All of them are anchored by our call tracking services. You have to know who is calling before you make them an offer.

So, if you are looking for a way to increase call traffic and a cost effective way to track that increase you really need to give us a call at www.capturethecall.com. We can provide a complete solution and some additional ideas to get the phone ringing.

Well more later, have a great day!

Hi All,

This update is to thank all of our customers and those interested in our product for taking the time to investigate this Call Capture technology. Over all our business grew over 233% last year. Our customer retention rate~ without a contract mind you~ is in the 90-95%% range. Ultimately 9 out of 10 customers who go to work with www.capturethecall.com stay. Read that again.....We have no contracts and our customers stay with us long term, not because they have a contract with us but because we treat them so well, provide a superior product choice, and offer the service at a competitive price.

Our website was revamped in October of 2005 by a tremendous internet company called Impact-Direct. You can find them at www.impact-direct.com. I would highly recommend that you use their services as they have been a boon to our lead generation program. As an organization they are truly second to none and the pricing model they offer is a tremendous value.

What they did for us is remarkable. Since the rebuild, traffic viewing our site is up over 300%. Our conversion rate is very good, so the basic challenge has been to get the traffic aware that we are there and once there to have a site compelling enough to get them to stay. It has worked and we now also boast a 200% increase in unique visitors. WOW!

Again, thanks for the support and we look forward to working with all new prospects and you our valued customers in the future. All of us here at www.capturethecall.com hope you have a successful and happy year!