Tracking marketing spend is always an issue. Companies spend money on many different campaigns to market their product(s) and struggle to report on the ROI of these marketing campaigns. As a marketing professional at a B2B company, I face the ongoing struggle to figure out the best way of tracking the leads that come in through our marketing campaigns. The web allows us to easily get our message out, and different web campaigns come with built-in tracking. But what about the most common connection you have with your leads/prospects — the phone. How do you track different web marketing campaigns through the phone?

Sure, you can beg your sales reps to ask each caller where they heard about your company, and you can hope that the caller actually remembers where they found you — neither of these has ever worked well for me. Instead, you can do what we at Angel.com have recently taken to doing. With our IVR and Salesforce.com integration we can now get much more exact tracking of where our phone leads came from and automatically store it directly in our CRM system.

Try this… for each marketing campaign you run, put a different phone number on the marketing piece. When people dial that specific number, you’ll know which campaign they came from. The call information, including “dialed number” will be populated directly into your Salesforce.com account so you can generate reports on these calls. Click on the screenshot at right for a larger image… for each call that comes into your sales department you can get call stats such as time of call, caller ID, hold time, talk time, rep the call was routed to, and most importantly for me, dialed number.

The call with the red box around it was one that I know came from one of our marketing campaigns — I can tell by the dialed number. From here I can run reports on each of the numbers to see which one is drawing the most calls. This call, for example, gives further ROI on our web advertising campaign on Google. Before implementing this, we only knew how many people clicked and filled out a web form. Now we know how many prospects forego the web form and call a sales rep instead. I can then run the caller ID against Leads, Opportunities and Accounts in Salesforce.com.

To take this even a step farther, I can actually automatically convert these calls into actual Leads in Salesforce.com by using one of our packaged integrations called LeadByFone, which does a reverse lookup on caller ID and inputs the name and address information from that reverse lookup as a new Lead in Salesforce.com. I’ll cover that in my next post.

Using your IVR application to track marketing campaigns has a definitive effect on the ROI of those campaigns. Don’t miss out on knowing where your phone leads are coming from.