SalesTechStar Interview with Todd Fisher, Co-Founder and CEO, CallTrackingMetrics

Todd Fisher, Co-Founder and CEO, CallTrackingMetrics shares more on the evolution of the CallTrackingMetrics platform and the rise of conversation intelligence in B2B:

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Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat Todd, tell us about your B2B journey and more about the CallTrackingMetrics platform, how has it evolved and what inspired the idea?

My wife Laure and I founded CallTrackingMetrics in our basement more than a decade ago. CallTrackingMetrics is now an award-winning and tenured digital platform that uses conversation intelligence to help organizations track and attribute all online and offline leads and inform contact center automation. When we started CTM, we were both doing consulting work with different types of businesses and found that–no matter what industry we were working with–all of our clients needed the ability to attribute a phone call with a paid ad. The more we chatted with our clients, the more obvious it became that there was a definite need for a call tracking and marketing attribution solution. Between Laure’s time as a management consultant and my experience founding software companies, leading software teams, and scaling websites for volume, it was a natural progression for us to create this solution.

We built the success of CallTrackingMetrics with the customer in mind, not venture capital growth. While our competitors were beholden to VC funding in order to advance and innovate their products, Laure and I, instead, looked within. As CallTrackingMetrics continues to grow, we are constantly refining the customer experience and incorporating our product into new communications channels to help companies gain more answers and insights. What started out as a desire to build something different from a typical software company product has now evolved into a global platform that supports companies in their quest to enhance customer experience and maximize their marketing budget.

How in your view can sales-marketing teams closely collaborate to use call scoring data to drive core lead acquisition and prospecting efforts?

With only 8% of companies aligning their sales and marketing teams, it’s obvious that aligning revenue operations is an overlooked outcome of a solid scoring strategy. While call scoring has traditionally been thought of as a call center tool, it’s also a highly effective solution for sales and marketing teams. Even if their job descriptions read differently, marketing and sales teams share a common goal in their job functions––driving growth and revenue. Call scoring helps both teams to better understand their customers by pulling demographic and behavioral information such as location, company size, job title, persona fit, purchase intent, buyer’s stage, and conversion outcomes.

At CallTrackingMetrics, we use our own software to execute the following three approaches to further collaboration between sales and marketing teams:

1. Discover the stage of the customer’s journey to make sure they are receiving the right message at the right time.
2. Identify which ad campaigns work and which ones don’t so we can adjust ad spend in real-time.
3. Uncover most frequently asked questions, pain points, and objections to hear firsthand what customers need at any given time and what prospects are looking for.

Read More: CallTrackingMetrics Ranks Among Highest-Scoring Businesses on Inc. Magazine’s Annual List of Best Workplaces for 2022

Despite all the access to innovative salestech and martech today, why are sales-marketing  teams still finding it a challenge to instill core alignment goals and processes as part of their daily systems?

Many sales and marketing teams operate in silos. They aren’t aligned on specific goals, ideal prospects and customers, and often both teams don’t fully grasp how similar their ultimate goals of driving growth and revenue truly are. The sales team might believe that marketing isn’t in tune with what the individual customer needs, while marketing might feel that the sales team is too focused on an individual prospect and not the whole customer base. At the end of the day, both teams struggle to acknowledge their shared objectives to better understand who they’re selling to and how to convert their efforts into revenue.

For businesses revisiting their sales-marketing alignment in 2022, what top tips and best practices would you share?

Integrating solutions like call scoring and other customer information-gathering tools like transcriptions and keyword spotting that are beneficial for both sales and marketing teams alike. This is key to ensuring the departments align. Both teams have a distinct set of needs to achieve success and if business leaders recognize the advantages of a shared tool that allows each team to reach their successful outcomes, the entire company will benefit. Aligning sales and marketing is critical to any organization’s success.

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A few thoughts on the future of B2B marketing and sales?

The marketing and sales industries are realizing that call tracking is more about understanding––not just viewing––the performance of an advertisement when it comes to utilization. In the future, we will see a deeper focus on conversion tracking and the analysis of outcomes we can derive from those ads. As a result, brands will better understand the connection between a phone call and the information shared on that call, thus allowing them to automatically convey the likelihood of conversion.

Some last thoughts, takeaways, digital sales/customer communication tips and best practices before we wrap up!

With the digital sales landscape as competitive as it is, it’s key for our team to shift our mindset to the Amazon approach––focusing on relieving customer pain rather than shoehorning a product to fit the market. When company leaders exhaust themselves over what their competitors are doing, they are limiting the amount of time, resources and energy they have to spend on advancing their own company. We’ve found that this mindset–focusing on the customer and their needs–allows us to stay competitive with more established, financially-larger companies.