Outbound Call Conversion Rate Visualization: Introducing Paths by Costello

A few months ago, Costello’s SDR team was was on a roll. We’d increased the number of monthly meetings set by 40%.

However, our conversation reporting told us that our conversation-to-meetings booked rate was still too low based on industry benchmarks.

But we had a problem. While the data told us that we had room to improve, it couldn’t tell us which part of the prospecting call needed to be fixed.

Did we need to adjust our pitch or our open-ended question? Or did we need to adjust how we handled objections? We didn’t know and needed a way to figure it out. Fast.

We had some anecdotal rep feedback, which was helpful, but we realized that we needed a more systematic approach.

So we started tracking a new piece of data in Costello: the conversation “path” — the direction the conversation went after a rep delivers the pitch.

Typical paths include objections like “Not Interested”, “What do you do again?”, “Already have a solution”, and every so often the positive, “Yes, let’s schedule a demo.”

We then matched this path data to the call outcome: Meeting Set, Meeting Not Set. This allowed us to do two things. First, we were able to quantify how often a prospecting call followed one path vs. another. Second, we were able to quantify the conversion rate of each path.

This. Changed. Everything.

Our paths quickly showed us two key things: 1) our calls went down two paths with roughly the same frequency, and 2) one of those paths did not convert as well as the other.

Now we knew where to start making improvements! So, we collaborated with our reps to tweak our playbook’s opening pitch and open-ended question to pre-empt the conversation from going down the lower converting path. We then re-worked our approach to handling the objection in that path.

And since we were making all of these changes in our playbook in Costello, these changes were immediately available to all of our reps for use on calls.

The best part? IT WORKED. Our conversation to meetings booked rate improved by 50% the following month. And we now had incredible visibility into what was happening on our calls, so we could continue to iterate and improve.

We talked to our customers about our Paths experiment. They were super-interested, because they had the same problem. It was becoming clear that we were onto something big.

But we still had one more problem to solve: the path data was super clunky to collect. We needed an easier way to quantify path frequency and give teams an intuitive way to actually see the paths.

Introducing Paths by Costello

Paths closes the loop for SDR teams by showing them which direction a call took (think “don’t have budget”, “using a competitor” objections) and what the conversion rate is for each one.

Teams will now be able to identify the lowest converting paths, iterate on those paths in Costello’s playbooks, and measure results. With Paths you can:

• Identify problem areas in your prospecting call with our intuitive Path visualization showing the frequency and conversion rate of each conversation path
• Quickly see the conversation-to-meetings booked rate for your entire team and at the individual rep level

Our customers believe this is a game changing feature for them that will help them sell better. We’re excited to bring it to life.