BIA/Kelsey Bytes are excerpts from research reports. This is the latest installment from the recently launched report, Call Commerce: A $1 Trillion Economic Engine. It picks up where last week’s post left off.

The report can be downloaded for free here.

Beyond Marketing

Most of this report has viewed the call commerce opportunity through a marketing lens. It’s all about driving high-value leads, measuring them to discern ROI and attribution, then using the resulting insights to inform and optimize ongoing marketing campaigns.

But an equally significant opportunity is to move beyond marketing and into sales operations. In other words, the insights gained from call analytics can be applied toward operational efficiencies in call centers. These include success metrics like improving close rates and reducing hold times.

Conversion Optimization

Put another way, the opportunity is to optimize for conversions, which takes all the advantages of call analytics and applies them to monitoring and iterating sales tactics. A few examples are sales rep training and increasing close rates by optimizing the wording and delivery of their scripts.

For example, Marchex (see disclosure) analyzed thousands of calls for a communications client during Q1, 2016. It measured a 16 percent conversion boost, when reps offered a specific sales promotion. The optimized script was then applied widely across the operation.

The lesson: by broadening call analytics, the opportunity exceeds $150 million and reaches a much larger addressable market that taps a wider range of enterprise budgets. That broader market includes adjacent areas of spending such as inside sales, CRM and customer support.

Read the rest.