John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the female startup club, hosted by Doone Roison, and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. If you're looking for a new podcast, the Female Startup Club shares tips, tactics and strategies from the world's most successful female founders, entrepreneurs, and women in business to inspire you to take action and get what you want out of your career. One of my favorite episodes who should be your first hire, what's your funding plan, Dr. Lisa Cravin shares her top advice from building spotlight oral. Listen to the female startup club, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:48): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guests today are Todd and Laure Fisher, their husband and wife co-founders of Call Tracking Metrics company. They found in 2011 in their basement, and together have grown it into an Inc 500 rated top ranked conversion analytics software serving over 30,000 businesses around the world. So Todd and Laure, I don't often have multiple guests, so I'll try to not fumble my questions to, to either, or you just take your turns. Whoever's whoever wants to jump in next, go from there. So welcome to the show.

Laure Fisher (01:26): Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Todd Fisher (01:27): Yeah. Thank

John Jantsch (01:28): You. So, so I'd love to hear about your journey. You know, every entrepreneur has some unique, uh, journey that brought into this point. I do know in looking at a little bit of your background, you're not software engineers, you didn't grow up in, in that necessarily. Um, you came from other professions, so I'd love to hear what led you, uh, to where we are today.

Laure Fisher (01:46): Well, that Todd has a, his is more technical

Todd Fisher (01:49): I was gonna say, I have a technical software engineering background. Lori does not.

John Jantsch (01:53): Ah,

Todd Fisher (01:54): Okay. So, but that's part of what I think made it work really well for the two of us. So Lori has a, a business background. I have a, an engineering background and so the two of us together, we can also kind of split what we focus on, uh, which I think also avoids conflict, uh, which is good.

John Jantsch (02:09): Oh, it absolutely awesome. You kind of have your strengths that you bring and your balance yeah. Was the idea to create the company one that you said, gosh, there's this huge need out here and, and a gap in the market, we should create it. Or were you trying to do this in your own careers? And couldn't find the right tool.

Todd Fisher (02:29): I think I'll take that one, Laurie. So, so I think that it wasn't sort of something we sought out to do. It was more of Laurie and I were both sort of running it. I'll say I'll call it a fledgling consulting company. We were trying to make things for our customers or provide AdWords support, SEO support. Okay. And a handful of them. I think two, we were very explicit and they would not take our business unless we could track and compound that with the fact that we were just coming out of that really nasty recession and, you know, still sort of, it was very raw, right. That, you know, people, after you finished a job for them, maybe we built a website and then they would be like, sorry, I can't pay for, you know, that website cuz uh, we're going outta business. So we dealt with a lot of that.

Todd Fisher (03:09): Right. And then, you know, so part of it was also like, Hey, the appeal of really sort of the appeal of having a, a, a software business that we could charge upfront. And we could also focus our energy instead of it being spread, you know, from one project to the next being completely unrelated from each other. Yeah, sure. There are things lessons you can carry forward, right. With what you, you know, suffered in, you know, learning for one customer to the next. Right. But it's not, doesn't compound as effectively as, Hey, it's one software platform. Right. And we're still kind of consulting, but we're doing it in the context of one platform. So it's has a much, it, it works better.

John Jantsch (03:47): Yeah. I've been throwing call tracking out here and, and call tracking metrics the name of your company, but we're probably ought to back up just a little bit. And you know, a lot of listeners of course, are very savvy, understand what that is, or at least have experienced in some fashion, but maybe give an overview of, you know, what call tracking is and how, you know, marketers use it.

Todd Fisher (04:07): Sure. Yeah. Do you wanna take, do you wanna, I can. Okay. Uh, so, so call tracking, you know, the early days started out with here's a phone number, put this phone number on your billboard and we'll measure how many times that phone number is called. And that must mean that billboard is worth X, right. And it sort of evolved with Google ads to, you know, okay, now somebody clicked on an ad and if they made a phone call, can you tie that phone call back to that particular ad in a particular, but over time, I'd say the real value is that now we can help you answer the question of not just which phone number, uh, and which click, but was there a sale, right? Yeah. Was there meaningful conversion that occurred? And if there was, well, let's make sure we can communicate that back to Facebook, Google, whatever ad platform you might be using.

Todd Fisher (04:53): Right. And to me, that's more of the, the value story here. Right. And, um, and then the mere fact that we're handling this phone call means that now we have a call recording, we have speech intelligence. Right. So we, we could say, Hey, somebody was pretty angry on that call. You might wanna work on that aspect of your business as well. Right. So it really kind of is interesting that it, you know, sort of all started with wanting to answer the simple question of how many people, how effective is this ad. Yeah. And it sort of trickles into all of the impacts that, that one ad and that led with all the customer interactions that occur right back to

John Jantsch (05:30): Yeah. And I, I think it really, it does kind of answer that like, uh, the phone companies used to talk about the, the last mile, you know, question was that there was a whole lot of data we had, but we couldn't really understand. I mean, it allowed us to weed out stuff that just totally didn't work, but we really couldn't refine what was bringing us revenue necessarily. And I think that that's, you know, for a lot of marketers, obviously, you know, the old joke kind of about, I, you know, some of my marketing works, I just dunno which, you know, part it. And I think a lot of marketers still take that approach of if I throw enough stuff out there and, you know, I think the thing that's really missing from that approach, of course, you could be very successful and grow a business. But if you knew that 20%, that was really working, you just double, triple, quadruple down on that and you'd really have a business wouldn't you

Laure Fisher (06:15): Mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm I know. And now we started with it being about phone calls, but now it's all these other communication channels. Right. Keep getting invented. Right. And so we've, we have to keep kind of weaving in all of these other channels and it really, it, you know, companies had all these different platforms for all these different channels. You know, they had like their email service, they had their, you know, text message platform. They had their chat platform. And now it's really about bringing those all together so that you can see that journey all the way through all of the different, you know, mediums that people are communicating through.

John Jantsch (06:47): Yeah. Well, in forms even, I mean, I, we have clients that half half of their contacts, phones calls, and half of them are, you know, consultation form fills, you know, so I mean, being, you really do need, uh, to bring many of those things to together. You, you we've kind of talked about it, but maybe you could cite a few examples. I mean, the obvious one is, you know, are my ads working or paying, but what are some other uses or maybe what you would call best uses for, for this type of tracking?

Laure Fisher (07:14): I would say one thing is what's happening on the phone calls is really interesting. A lot of, a lot of companies think they kind of, they know what's happening on the calls because their team tells them. But when you actually hear the calls and listen to them in person, you know, you learn a lot. And then also you can use machine learning and to have, you know, a system like ours, listen to the calls in a way and scan them for patterns. So you could figure out, you know, what words keep getting mentioned in the call, you know, where does your salesperson have to say no, you know, we don't do that. What are the trends that you're seeing in terms of, you know, voice tones in their voice and when they might be getting angry. And there's just so much you can learn from actually what's happening in the call when you actually hear it directly in the call versus relying on interpretation from someone else telling you

John Jantsch (08:00): Well, and I would, I would also say, I mean, we have clients that most of their phone calls seem to come on Monday, Tuesday . And that really has some decision making, you know, about what we better have, you know, ready on Monday, Tuesday, right? Yeah.

Laure Fisher (08:13): Yes, yeah. Yes. Like which agents are performing, you know, you see all sorts of interesting information about who answers their phone really quick and whose phone calls last forever, but the calls don't seem to go that well, right. You know, you can see all sorts of interesting performance data and also understanding when you run an ad, how quickly do the phone calls happen. Right. So what should you be thinking about in terms of budgeting for advertising and how that translates into communications coming into to your call center?

John Jantsch (08:39): So, so we are, you know, my agency and the training that I do. I mean, we are big proponents of this for a lot of the reasons we've already talked about, but for those agencies out there listening, this is an amazing way for you to prove your worth. And I think a lot of people forget that, you know, they're given reports with traffic on them and, you know, with, uh, keyword rankings and whatnot. But you know, when the client says, well, yeah, we're not getting any more business. And then I go listen to five calls that just don't get answered, or they go to voicemail or, you know, whatever it is. I mean, it's pretty easy to say we're doing our job , you know, but you're not. But then O obviously, you know, the better scenario that is that, that, you know, you're very, is very easy then to connect all the analytics together, to show, you know, this phone call was actually worth, you know, $12,473 this month, or, you know, or these group of phone calls. So it's a great tool to, you know, to prove why you're charging what you're charging.

Laure Fisher (09:31): Yeah. It's and it's interesting. Cause a lot of times CU customers will say, they thought they're surprised by some of the things that, you know, they might an ad, a particular ad channel might be driving. A lot of traffic might be driving a lot of phone calls. But when you look at like what types of phone calls is driving and what the long term value of those customers are, it's surprising to people sometimes, you know, they yeah. Have all sorts of learnings around like organic versus paid and, you know, social media and what really is the value of that. So it allows them to just, you know, really kind of understand even further, like, was this really a good lead? You know, was this really worth it? You know, this channel that we invested in

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John Jantsch (10:59): So a lot of channels, email specifically, and certainly on social, uh, media and Google's making some adjustments about, you know, tracking has actually become an evil word in, in some service, right. See, except for, uh, mailing lists, you can, you know, you can buy a mailing list that, that has anything you want on it. send it to anybody you want for

Laure Fisher (11:20): Everybody lives, drive it over to their house. Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:23): You can know what diseases they have, what medications they're taking. Right. But let's get back to the, what we can talk about, you know, tracking in the, you know, in the email world in the digital world is coming under a lot of scrutiny. So how are you preparing for that? Or what do you have to say about, you know, the person that's saying, oh, but we're not supposed to track.

Todd Fisher (11:42): Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, I think there's a lot of misconceptions out there around this, but you know, it is what it is. You know, first of all, one of the things that we say is, Hey, listen, like we're, it's first party tracking. Not only that, but somebody clicked on this paid ad. That was a very expensive, uh, thing for that business to, to put out all the businesses really asking is to understand whether or not that expensive paid ad is having some value. Right. So that they can better focus their effort for the next time. Right. And so I, I, I really think that if, if you, you know, it can explain to somebody, Hey, you know, for example, we, we had a, I think it was like a lawyer who was explaining to me, he's like, you know, my, my ads cost $50 a click.

Todd Fisher (12:19): Right. I was just like, wow. So he's like, you absolutely need to, I don't wanna know unless these are turning into phone calls sure. Is what he told me. That was our, one of our first customers. Yep. And I remember being like, okay, well, that's, uh, really important. Let's make sure we, you know, we can answer that question for you. So, you know, often I hear is, you know, you know, people go down, the path of tracking is evil and then they start dropping words like deep state and, you know, you know, you know, foreign actors and all this kind of stuff. And I'm like, well, wait a second. Who are we talking about here? Cause the plumber down the street, when you click on their ad, I think it's gonna be okay. Right. So what are we actually doing there to prepare for that? So, so first of all, um, there's things that are just happening, right? So Google, um, has been forced to change how they track Google ads, right? So there's something called GBRA w braid and only just recently were the APIs available for us to actually pass those tokens back to Google for conversions. But you know, we work with Google's ecosystem, we'll collect those tokens and we'll pass them to Google in, in response to conversion events. Yeah. What else

Laure Fisher (13:22): Also giving customers tools to manage the data that they collect. Yes. You know, so whatever provider they're using, they need to have the tools to get rid of things they don't need control so that they're collecting just what they need, delete things they don't need. So a lot of it, I find even with service providers, we use, you know, that it's, it's all about the cus us being able to control what it is that we're collecting. Cause a lot of times people find that they're collecting all this information. They don't even need half of it. So get smart about, you know, what it is that you're collecting. It's true. Also when you look at GDPR compliance as well, that you really need to be able to justify what you're collecting and, and have a good handle over how you're securing it and how to get rid of it, you know, when you're done with it.

John Jantsch (14:02): And does your tool provide, you know, things like HIPAA compliance, you know, for people that obviously in that medical area that one's probably touchier than GDPR for a lot of people,

Todd Fisher (14:13): It's funny. It is. Yeah. But in a different way, GDPR and and HIPAA kind of have different kind of edges to them. So, but we cater HIPAA both.

John Jantsch (14:21): Mm-hmm, one of the things that is becoming increasingly popular maybe because the technology is caught up to make it increasingly easier to do is segmenting customers and leads and people that are on your list already, not on your list already. How does call tracking play into that, maybe that kind of personal segmenting journey.

Todd Fisher (14:41): Um, so yeah, so, so we have a lot of a attribution that we can apply to the contact. So one of the things we do is when you make a phone call into our system, we actually create two records. It's the, the call activity. And then if it's not already created the contact record, and then as that user kind of interacts with you, we collect additional information on that contact record. And one of the, one of the big use cases, I like to kind of say, Hey, is, this is good, right? Um, is let's say you're driving and to get ahold of, you know, business X, Y, or Z, you know, unfortunately you did have to go through a rather complicated voice venue, right? Your first time you've ever called them. Right. Right. You had press one and you had to listen, press two and maybe listen, press four or something.

Todd Fisher (15:23): Now you're finally talking to a person who's really able to help you. Right. You're in your car though. The kids are screaming in the back drive under a bridge and the call drops, right. This is like tragic situation. Right? Well, if, if that business had known who you were and in our system set up a rule that just said, Hey, if it's within, let's say 24 hours, skip all the voicemail stuff and just go directly to the, the, the last agent who you were talking to. Right. Well then imagine how much better this would be when like 10 seconds later you come outta the bridge or outta the tunnel and you call back and well, wow. You're talking to the same person again. Right.

John Jantsch (16:03): What's interesting. I think even just knowing that somebody is a customer or somebody is not a customer, you know, that just that designation could certainly trigger different behavior, couldn't it?

Todd Fisher (16:15): Yes. Yeah. And that's been a big part of our product is just helping to cater to those kinds of use cases where it's a repeat call. It's an, you know, we know that this person was inquiring about product X, Y, or Z, right. Cause of the lead form that they filled out. Yeah. So now instead of routing them to a general queue, maybe we're gonna route 'em to a specialist queue. And so in this case, you know, you can say, Hey, you know, tracking really gave you a better experience. Right? Yeah. Maybe it took some of the frustration of your day out of your day. Right? Yeah. That's the way I try to position it is, Hey, there's lots of friction points here. You know, when you call that business, you really feel like entitled so that they should know everything about you. Well, that's part of what tracking helps do, right. Is give you that kind of white glove treatment.

John Jantsch (16:56): Well, and, and I think the, the beauty of what you just said is if it's working well, you didn't even know it did it. Yes. And that, of course that's the frustrating thing for somebody that sits there and codes all day. Right. that's right. You know how hard it is to actually make it

Todd Fisher (17:11): . Yes.

John Jantsch (17:12): Yes. So, so if somebody was looking at you and there are other players out there that, that do call tracking and whatnot as well, and you know, what would you say, Hey, but here's our, here's how we're different or here's, you know, here's our super feature that nobody else has.

Todd Fisher (17:25): Sure. Um, what do you think Laura? I mean, I think what we really do and shine in our space is that we really bring multiple facets of the space together in almost the hub fashion, where we have other, we, so in, in a way, I'd say we have competitors in many different industries because we kind of bring many different industries into one platform. And that's really our specialty is that we've brought these things together. So you don't have to say, I want my call tracking company. I want my contact center software. I want my CRM software, you know, you can kind of just pull them all together into one place and it integrates better this way. Right. I'd say in our space, we, we are friends with everyone because we integrate with everyone, but, but we can also provide the, the feature as well. So you kind of get choice in that way.

John Jantsch (18:08): You, you know, one channel, I guess, that we haven't even talked about that I meant to, because so many businesses, some businesses are using for outbound marketing, but I don't think that's really the true use. A lot of businesses are using SMS as a true customer service tool. Your point is coming up or, you know, it's time to reorder, you know, whatever to just kind of, and people are expecting that and appreciate the text that way. How does, how does a call tracking tool play into that? Well,

Laure Fisher (18:31): You can, you can tie text message campaigns to, you know, a person and their pattern of interaction. So, you know, maybe they have filled out a form that, you know, they're interested in a certain product, they clicked on an ad. They've talked to someone, you know, about that phone call, what happened in the phone call. You can now target your text message information to them in a whole different way. Obviously you need to have permission to text them, but you've, you're able to segment them right. And target the communication. The other thing that I think is really important in text messaging, a lot of people think about when, you know, the, the blast text blast. Right. But what I think is really interesting is the conversational texting where you can actually have just a one-on-one conversation, whether it's for service or a sales interaction, the, you know, the people are so much more likely to respond to a text message and open a text message. And especially if it's easy, you know, schedule, appointment via text, or, you know, have like, I actually have like a conversation with a salesperson via text without having get on the phone with 'em. So that I think is really interesting. And, and something, I think a lot of companies are just starting to kind of scratch the surface on, maybe they've done their like text blast with their promo codes and all of that, but really figuring out how do we create kind of meaningful interactions with customers over text messaging.

John Jantsch (19:43): Yeah, absolutely. So Todd, Lori, thanks for, so by the duct tape marketing podcast, uh, tell us a little more about call tracking. Tell us, give us kind of the 32nd commercial or anywhere you wanna send people to find out more specifically about call tracking metrics.

Laure Fisher (19:58): Yeah. I would go to call tracking metrics.com. That's the best place to go. And you'll see that we've got three different plans you can sign up right on our website. We have an amazing support team, amazing professional services team. That'll help you implement the service as well. So, you know, definitely feel free to call our sales team, have a demo, or you can sign up right on the website and get started.

John Jantsch (20:18): Awesome. Well, again, thanks for sound by the duct tape marketing podcast, and hopefully we'll run into you both, uh, somewhere out there on the road.

Laure Fisher (20:24): Thank you.

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