Hi, I’m Pavel, co-founder of Callmaker.net , a tool that helps businesses get more inbound sales calls from website visitors. This article is about pain that stops your potential customers from picking up the phone and making a purchase at your company.

In 2016 more than 70 billion of inbound sales calls are expected to reach US businesses according to BIA/Kelsey. That is 233% growth during the past 2 years, and it may seem surprising in respect that messaging and chats are gaining popularity, too.

Of course, sales departments are pleased with the trend because inbound calls are hot opportunities. Especially when clients need a consultation before making a purchase or when selling high margin B2B and B2C products.

Although inbound sales calls are growing and some businesses are eager to receive them, many people still prefer messaging opportunities on websites, like email or live chat. Why does it happen and how can we force them to pick up the phone?

Phone is not that perfect

Phone calls, as a communication channel, have lots of drawbacks.

While working on a conversion rate increase for our agency’s clients, we conducted a survey and found out the main barriers for making a call to a company:

1. Fear of an unknown person. There might be a pushy or incompetent sales rep,

2. Reluctance to waste time on hold or pressing endless voice menu buttons,

3. Unwillingness to pay for the connection. Especially considering interstate or international calls.

And even if in your company has friendly sales reps picking up the phone immediately without annoying voice menus, we often recall these cons before starting to dial a number. This is what stops us from getting in contact.

All these issues are eliminated in live chats. Partly that is a reason why chats are so widespread on websites. Still, messaging is mostly helpful when you need an answer to a simple question, e.g. a product’s price or stock. However, when you need a consultation about SEO services or packaging design, it may get inconvenient. A rep replies with a delay, and having to type long messages in a small chat window is slow and unbearable.

And what is worse, businesses suffer too. A more personal emotional contact is created during a phone conversation, and reps can ask more questions. With clients’ migration from calls to messages, sales people get weaker opportunities for closing deals.

So, we decided to create a perfect communication channel and break the barriers that stop people from calling businesses. As a plus, get more inbound sales calls and loyal customers.

How we reinvented phone on businesses websites

“T oday we are going to reinvent the phone” — Steve Jobs, 2007

During A/B testing, we realized what exactly we need to create a perfect phone communication tool:

A call to action in the bottom right corner to pay users’ attention to it without any popup windows;

to pay users’ attention to it without any popup windows; A photo of a rep who is going to talk to website visitors. To create a friendly atmosphere and break fears of a call;

who is going to talk to website visitors. To create a friendly atmosphere and break fears of a call; An option to receive an incoming call from a rep ready to talk, with no waiting on the line;

from a rep ready to talk, with no waiting on the line; A response within just a few seconds. Еach time a client enters a phone number, we automatically call company’s sales reps, and when somebody answers, we reach the customer and connect them into one line.

A free interstate and international phone connection

A proactive communication offering to discuss details on the phone

This is how we’ve built Callmaker — a tool that helps you get more inbound sales calls.

Callmaker widget look and feel

With Callmaker, each website visitor can submit a phone number on every website’s page and get a guaranteed call from a company’s rep within 25 seconds. As simple as that.

AI-powered conversion rate increase

What’s more, we started analyzing users behavior: time spent on a page, number of clicks, interaction with forms, scrolling etc. Thanks to machine learning, we taught the system to show a popup window suggesting a call when a user is most likely to make a buying decision.

As a result, when our first clients, including Bentley and Ferrari auto dealerships, installed Callmaker, they noticed an immediate conversion rate increase by 10–50%.

You can try this on your website and sign up for a free trial on callmaker.net.

P.S. I’d love to hear your feedback on unwillingness to make phone calls. What are reasons why you postpone your calls?