By monitoring inbound and outbound calling trends, a business can have a clear picture of when peak sales seasons hit and can better anticipate staffing needs to handle the increased flow of holiday sales traffic.

The tracking of traffic is made possible by call detail records (CDR) formats. Call detail records, both local and long distance, can be used for usage verification, billing reconciliation, network management and to monitor telephone usage to determine volume of phone usage, as well as abuse of your company's telephone system. CDR's are an asset in managing long distance telephone costs and aid in the planning for future telecommunications needs.

Many businesses rely on inbound calls and orders for holiday sales, but this requires an external marketing push to get the holiday sales message in the minds of prospective buyers. To better track which marketing campaigns work best, using call accounting software to analyze toll-free vanity numbers dedicated to a specific ad, TV or direct mail campaign can be an invaluable sales prediction tool.

For outbound calls by a sales team, monitor progress and efficiency through call detail records that can tell sales managers how long a team member's call lasted. Are they talking too long? Not long enough? Are they making enough calls? Are the calls personal in nature, rather than to achieve an increase in holiday sales?

Knowing these numbers can be a huge motivation and training tool for outbound sales calls and sales forces. The more phone calls they make, the more they sell. Keep track of their call volume and manage them accordingly.