MarTech Interview with Marc Ginsberg, CEO at CallRail

Marc Ginsberg, CEO at CallRail talks about the key benefits of call tracking and conversation intelligence capabilities for sales-marketing teams:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat Marc, tell us more about your sales-marketing journey, we’d love to hear about what it’s like being CEO at CallRail?

My professional journey has been almost entirely focused on bringing new solutions, typically driven by data, to businesses to enable them to achieve their goals. Whether it was the products or the pricing models, I have always prided myself on creating solutions that best address the specific needs, challenges, and goals of my customers in their respective fields.

I have had the opportunity to work across many industries including marketing technology, entertainment, advertising services, financial services, consumer packaged goods, education, and travel. The common thread to all of those experiences has been a focus on delivering the premium product in the category. The breadth of industries I have worked across has taught me how to quickly identify customer needs and lead dedicated teams to architect tailored solutions for them.

All of my prior experiences working with customers in this capacity have prepared me for my role as CEO of CallRail, where my attention is entirely focused on ensuring businesses of all sizes are equipped with the best possible platform to help them market with confidence. We do this through building, delivering, and supporting seamless technology that makes it easy to turn more leads into better customers.

Mostly, what I have learned in my career is that building great products and real-world solutions for businesses of all sizes is only as good as the passion, commitment and collaboration of the team. This is really the secret sauce of CallRail. We have some of the smartest, kindest, and most hard-working people out there. They are committed to our customers first and foremost. It’s exciting to be at the helm of the company at this crucial stage of growth–we just celebrated surpassing $75 million in ARR, a 55% increase in headcount year-over-year, and the acquisition of more than 10,000 new customers and almost 400 new agency partners in 2021.

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We all know how small businesses are actually very integral to overall economic and commercial value. What are some of the core challenges that marketers of SMBs struggle with today that you’d like to share best practices for?

Of course, we help our customers with a variety of challenges, but there are two, in particular, I’d like to call out.

Firstly, SMBs, along with many other businesses, continue to struggle to understand the return on their marketing spend. While the ability to track marketing spend to new customers has come a long way digitally thanks to online tracking tools, offline channels continue to be an opportunity. At CallRail, we can help small businesses grow and thrive by giving them confidence that they’ll get results from their marketing spend whether that’s via a form submission prompted by a Google Ad or a phone call to a number on a billboard. Our call tracking capabilities track and analyze inbound calls so that businesses know exactly which marketing campaigns perform best. This data arms businesses to lower their cost per qualified lead so they get more for their money, allowing them to invest where it counts to get more valuable customers. These are capabilities that many of the largest companies utilize today. We are leveling the playing field to ensure that businesses of all sizes have access to these types of tools.

Secondly, most SMBs do not have call centers. A missed call or text almost certainly leads to a lost customer. We are all consumers, so we know that if no one is there to answer our call we move on to the next business in our search results. At CallRail, we have built tools and capabilities to ensure no lead is ever left behind. Our all-in-one communications platform, Lead Center, automatically consolidates all customer communications–calls, texts, chats, and form submissions–into one unified inbox with the contextual data to show what ad drove them to reach out. This functionality ensures that the entire team can quickly view, manage, and respond to key communications. In turn, no lead goes unanswered, is routed to the wrong person, or lacks context needed to win the business. At a time when businesses are facing serious headwinds, including labor and supply chain challenges, the cost of missing a potential customer has never been greater. We are committed to providing a seamless solution that solves this problem.

What are some of the core strategies that you feel SMBs need to follow as marketplace trends change, to keep up with the growing competition and the threat from larger brands?

Businesses need to build and maintain intimacy with their customers. They need to know them, customize their messaging to them, respond to them in a timely manner, and ensure they deliver the perfect solution to fit their specific needs. No more, no less. It is this trust and relationship that can not be replicated by larger organizations. When your customers know you have their back, it breeds loyalty.

Once a lead reaches out to your business, your team then needs to be fully equipped to provide excellent, tailored service that solves their need and keeps them coming back. The tools businesses need to do this effectively aren’t just reserved for big companies with big budgets. Our Conversation Intelligence platform records and transcribes inbound calls and classifies, qualifies, scores, and assigns a dollar value to these conversations, helping sales teams of all sizes understand what is happening on their calls and how to improve service.

For SMBs in particular, what kind of martech/salestech tools do you feel can enable better business outcomes and growth?

Keep it simple and focus on investments that can be tracked. Leverage advertising platforms and tools that are tried and true and seamless. This will enable them to spend less time on administration and more time on serving and building relationships with their customers. Most business owners started their companies because they loved to do or create something that brought value to others, not because they wanted to update spreadsheets or analyze marketing data. Integrated martech and communications platforms help business owners get back to doing what they do best, which is serving their customers, local economies, and their communities.

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A few thoughts on how you feel martech as a segment will move in 2022?

In the past few years, we’ve seen SMBs quickly adapt their marketing strategies and spend to this hybrid working world, where customers have become accustomed to the ability to easily and quickly connect with businesses via social media, chat, web forms, and phone. As we look ahead to the future, we’ll see more businesses focus on meeting customers where they are to retain loyalty through a convenient and streamlined buying process.

Offering hybrid and easily-accessible avenues to reach your business, and customizing your customer service accordingly, is imperative. Marketing technology solutions that enable businesses to do that well will come out on top. Businesses are hungry for success and are ready to put revenue behind marketing initiatives that yield high ROI. In fact, our team just conducted research into the marketing priorities for modern law firms, and found that, “95% agreed that because marketing is a non-billable expense, the spending risk is greater, making it even more important to use marketing dollars effectively.”

Our team also conducted research into the upcoming trends and priorities of digital marketing agencies in 2022 and found that agencies predict an average of 68% revenue growth in 2022. At CallRail, we’re excited and ready to partner with agencies as they scale in the coming year.

Some last thoughts, takeaways, digital growth hacking, and martech thoughts, tips and best practices before we wrap up?

I’m grateful for the time to speak with you and your team. This is an incredibly exciting moment for CallRail–at the heels of our 10th anniversary, we are truly at an inflection point of growth. Along with some of our wins mentioned above, we also just celebrated 568% usage growth of the CallRail Lead Center and demonstrated our gold-standard privacy and security practices through our SOC 2 Type II attestation. I’m so looking forward to the journey ahead; we’re laser-focused on delivering and supporting products that help more businesses market with confidence.

CallRail is a marketing analytics and business communications platform.

Marc Ginsberg is the CEO at CallRail