Hi Aqeel,
Full disclosure, I work for Invoca, but I am not in sales. I am the Marketo user here, and one of the main users of our Invoca for Salesforce product, which is the connector that brings phone call data into Marketo.
I thought it would be helpful if I shared some of how we're using the integration. Weaving phone calls into marketing automation is new territory, so I included a fair amount of screenshots from Marketo, Invoca, and Salesforce to hopefully make it more tangible how it all comes together.
Basic Setup:
The nuts and bolts first. In Marketo Admin, you'll enable the Salesforce Object Sync with the Invoca Call Log, which is a Salesforce Custom Object.
Once you've enabled the custom object sync, you'll get this new set of Invoca Call Log triggers and filters to work with in smart campaigns and smart lists.
These triggers and filters behave like all other Marketo triggers, and you can use Marketo's Add Constraint to filter on any call data point that Invoca captures.
This is just a very partial view of the constraints that are available. I counted almost 50 Invoca call data points in the Add Constraint that you can filter on, ranging from caller demographic data, to Invoca campaign name, to URL tracking parameters, to in-call activity such as keywords mentioned, and IVR key presses.
One of the main ways we use Invoca data in Marketo is for attribution. We set up smart campaigns that capture campaign responses that occur via inbound call instead of via lead form. Here's an example of how we use it in lead nurturing.
In the Invoca platform, we create a unique phone number (which is just as easy and fast as creating a new form in Marketo), and include that number in all of our Marketo nurturing emails.
The smart campaign below listens for calls to that unique phone number.
(An Invoca Call Log can be added to a lead or a contact in Salesforce, hence the two separate triggers — one for leads and one for contacts.)
When the condition is met, we change our lead nurture program status to converted (success), create an interesting moment in Salesforce so that call is now a visible part of the rep’s view of the prospect's engagement, change lead score, etc. Flow step 1 is important because without it, our Marketo nurturing program and corresponding SFDC campaign would not get proper attribution/ROI credit.
And here's the rep's view inside Salesforce through Marketo Sales Insight.
Lead Handoff:
During the sales process, when an SDR (Sales Development Rep) hands over a lead to an AE, normally an AE would look at the SDR's notes in the activity history. But as we all know, sometimes those notes are sparse. But now every inbound call gets attached to a lead or contact's record in Salesforce as an Invoca Call Log.
The AE can drill into to the call log detail and listen to the actual recording of the call(s) to get a more complete understanding of what's transpired between the prospect and the SDR, and have a better sense of the prospect's pain points and what they're looking to achieve.
(the green button in screenshot below is "play recording")
(If a call comes in where the caller ID is not associated with any known lead or contact, you can either set it to automatically create a new lead in Salesforce, or just have it added to an unassigned call log report and wait to have a rep associate it with a lead or contact.)
Dynamic Numbers:
In the lead nurturing example above, we’re listening for a call to specific phone number, which is how you'd set things up for static use cases like email, tradeshow collateral, content marketing assets, etc. But in your online advertising campaigns such as paid search, you'll use dynamically generated phone numbers.
You place a piece of Invoca tracking code on your landing pages just as you would Marketo's Munchkin code. So when a visitor hits your site, Invoca generates a unique number on the fly just for that visitor. When they call, Invoca marries the URL tracking parameters from the page they're calling from with the unique phone number.
Here's an example URL from a paid search ad:
http://www.invoca.com/?utm_source=AdWords&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=keyword&utm_campaign=Invoca_Branded&gclid=CMmUiI-ayMECFU8LMgodTWMAMA
So if someone clicks on one of our Adwords ads, goes to our landing page, and instead of filling out a form decides to call, here's the smart campaign that will identify that call is from paid search, and make sure that marketing's paid search efforts get credit for driving that call, instead of having it end up in Salesforce as "inbound call" or "sales generated".
Smart List:
(In the screenshot, the constraint "pool param 1" in Invoca corresponds to utm_source).
Flow:
On the Salesforce side, pre-canned Invoca dashboards provide an aggregate view of all your call data so you see which marketing channels and campaigns are driving calls, and which ones are turning into revenue.
Going beyond attribution to get conversation intelligence:
The above examples are mostly about attribution — what sources are driving calls. There's another aspect where we use Invoca call intelligence to better understand what's actually happening during the call.
As mentioned in the first example, you can go back and listen to any call recording. But life is too short to be reviewing recordings of every inbound call. So we use Invoca Signal, which allows you to define specific keywords or phrases (we call them "Signals") to have Invoca listen for on every call. If that Signal condition is met, you can take a variety of next steps using any of your standard Marketo flow steps.
At Invoca, we sell to many different types of marketers, with search marketers being one of our main targets. So we setup a "Search" Signal, where if any of these words are mentioned on the call, it's likely a search marketer, and marketing now knows to send them search-related content.
Here’s another sample use case. Say you're Marketo, and you have multiple product lines: Marketo Lead Management, Revenue Cycle Analytics, Real-time Personalization, and Marketo Financial Management.
Marketo certainly has segments defined to listen for digital interest in a particular product line so they can drop prospects into the most relevant nurturing track. For instance, for Real-time Personalization, they might listen for:
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visits web page on Real-time Personalization product
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registers for webinar on Real-time Personalization
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clicks link in email where link is about Real-time Personalization
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downloads content about Real-time Personalization
Now they can also set an Invoca Signal to listen for the phrase Real-time Personalization to be mentioned X number of times on a call. If that condition is met, add that person to the Real-time Personalization Segment. So Marketo is no longer listening for only digital behavior, it's now getting smart to offline behavior.
There's an endless number of ways to combine Invoca Signal and Marketo, but here's a few more ideas.
Opportunity Closed/Lost Signal:
If an opportunity is marked closed lost AND there's a call log associated with the contact, then send alert to sales manager to listen to recording to see if the deal could have been handled any differently, or if there's anything that could be done to save the deal.
Competitive Selling:
You notice you’re losing deals to a key competitor and you want to know how well your reps are able to articulate why you’re better than competitor X. Set up a signal listening for the competitor’s name and have an alert go out to review recordings of those calls. Take those learnings and use it to coach your reps. (Currently, to listen for non-english language terms, there’s some training required to get the system to recognize those terms).
Product Enhancement:
Say you just launched a new version of your UI and you want to understand which of the new features might be confusing your customers and driving calls to support. You could set up Signals to listen for specific product features.
I’m getting a bit carried away here, but there's just a lot of neat stuff you can do with Marketo/Salesforce/Invoca that goes beyond basic "call tracking", and I just wanted to throw out some ideas. One of the things I like most about Marketo is how you can mold it to fit your business process. With this new call data, Marketo becomes even more powerful.
Lastly I’ll confess that as a B2B tech company, our phone lines aren’t exactly ringing off the hook like a B2C call center. But inbound calls convert to opportunities so much better for us than web leads, and our reps prefer them so much more than web leads, that anything we can do to understand how to get more of them makes them happy. This data certainly helps us do that. And equally important, it helps us optimize the performance of our reps, which is obviously a critical point of the conversion process.
Hope this helps.
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