The old adage, ”You can’t improve what you can’t measure” speaks for everything about sales and business. Measuring your cold calling efforts keeps you aware of where your business is going, what strategies to adapt, and where to improve on further.
However, for those just starting their cold calling efforts, it can be more difficult to begin with a clean slate. How do you know which metrics and KPIs are important? How do you measure each of them? What benchmarks should you set and target?
In this article, we offer you tips to help with that.
Cold call productivity metrics
Productivity happens when tools and processes in your business are made more efficient. To make sure how to fix these processes, certain metrics need to be tracked and observed.
Cost per Acquisition (CPA)
The first productivity cold calling metric you should always keep an eye on is Cost per Acquisition. This measures the costs of your expenses from every paying customer, determining your ROI. While this is more on the financial side of your business, it can also show the results of your marketing and outbound calling efforts. This helps in determining which strategy is worth keeping, what to change, and what to invest on further as your business progresses.
Number of Dials Per Hour
Dialing is an essential part of cold calling campaigns. This metric helps understand how productive your dialer is. It measures the number of leads contacted for an average business hour. However, choosing an autodialer just for the sake of hitting quotas may not always be a good thing for your business. To be effective, you shouldn’t compromise quality over quantity. Go for one that doesn’t only dial the numbers for you, but also has functions and features that efficiently manage bad leads and numbers.
Contact Rate
Almost similar to conversion rates, Contact Rate measures the total number of actual live person calls made that move on to the next step of your funnel. This metric allows you to assess your lead generation performance. Higher dials with low contact rates would mean you need to level up your lead generation strategies in order to generate high-quality leads.
First Call Close rate (FCC)
The first call close rate metric refers to the number of calls and customers that closed on the first call. This will help you set your outbound sales funnel strategy, and determine the common qualities of good leads. For instance, if you called a number of 500 leads in a day, and 150 of them purchased a product or service as soon as you hung up, then you have a First Call Close rate of 30%. The average rate is between 15% to 30%, but can also be affected by a lot of factors like the type of industry, lead qualification, buyer personas, and others.
Occupancy Rate
Occupancy rate measures the availability of your agents to answer or attend to calls. This metric is also crucial in weighing down hiring more or fewer agents you need for your business. This is also important in choosing a dialer for your business. To do this, tracking talk times, wait times, idle times, and other call-related activities done by your agents should be considered. Calculate your occupancy rate using this formula:
Average Handle Time (AHT)
This metric talks about the duration of an entire call transaction from the second the customer picks up until it hangs up. The Average Handle Time should also record the total time length of call transfers, hold times and wait times. This is necessary for managers to track a team’s efficiency while gauging how many agents are required to handle calls on every shift.
Call quality
Based on the nature of your business, multiple factors can affect the quality of your calls. It is important to set specific cold call KPIs and metrics for your agents to observe. Note that call quality metrics vary depending on your business model and sales process. For the basics, you can assess each agent based on adherence to the call script, agent’s communication skills, problem-solving skills, etc. You can also include customer satisfaction metrics like customer satisfaction score (CSAT), First call resolution (FCR), and so on. It’s also best to record outbound calls so you can easily track all calls and assess them using a predetermined set of metrics.
Average Follow-Up Attempts
As modern salespeople, know that your fortune is always in the follow-up. Customers nowadays are harder to persuade, which is why your cold call follow-ups should never fall short of your efforts. Your Average Follow-up Attempts metrics can help you set the standard number of follow-up call attempts that should be done by your agents. It measures the average number of follow-up calls done by agents to convert a lead into a sale.
Hold time
Cold calling is an agent-initiated effort, which is why Hold Times plays a crucial role in your campaigns. Hold time measures the amount of time a customer spends on hold during a cold call. The average benchmark for hold times is situational. After tracking this metric, the next most important thing is to shift your strategies to reduce it.
Custom Metrics (Call Tags, Filters, Dispositions)
No business is entirely the same. Everything differs when it comes to processes, business models, operations, and solutions. It is important to have tools that can customize the tracking of different metrics in your business. Find a cold calling tool that offers custom call tagging, filters, and dispositions, like Aloware. This will help you create or track reports that are more suitable for your business. With Aloware, you’ll have full control over your systems and workflows to make sure everything is in perfect sync with your goals.
Cold calling is not a walk in the park. This is why tool efficiency and productivity must be implemented in every part of your campaign efforts. Productivity won’t only bring more customers in, it also helps you manage time so you can spend it on things that matter the most.
Aloware is a contact center software that offers ingenious productivity tools for every salesperson out there. With its unlimited calling and texting features, combined with automation capabilities, you’ll never find a more efficient tool such as this. Schedule a demo with one of our representatives today!
