What is a Progressive Dialer and How Does it Help Your Sales Team?
With business growth comes great things- larger market share, increased revenue, and happy shareholders.
However, sustaining profit growth is never easy. Sales organizations must quickly and seamlessly change sales strategies and tactics to grow sales. In order to survive, they need to pay close attention to recent trends and be up-to-date with the latest technologies that can further help
Growth has been one of the most talked-about topics to date because of our currently constrained environment. Despite the world’s economic climate recently being challenging, some companies still manage to continue growing.
According to research – which consists of extensive surveys of sales executives and tons of interviews – it was found that there were five practices that shine through that differentiated the fast-growing companies from the slow-growing companies.
Let’s take a brief look at what these five game-changer practices are and why they create such an impact in growth differences between companies and organizations
1. Fast-growing companies find growth before their competitors do. Looking ahead has never been a bad thing. As they say, change IS constant, which is why anticipating and preparing for future changes can have a big impact on the growth of a company. Fast growing companies and sales organizations invest in identifying growth opportunities, whether through understanding current and future trends or drilling into large amounts of data or finding pockets of growth in their existing market.
2. They sell the way their customers want to buy. Multiple channels are used to reach and serve customers of all different sizes and different markets. In this practice, an efficient and organized approach across direct, indirect, and digital channels is key in successfully optimizing the use of the stated channels.
3. They soup up their sales engines. High-growth companies invest in sales operations, pre-sales, and the alignment between marketing and technology to fire up and build their engines for growth.
4. They focus on their people. This practice goes without saying, that there’s a need spend time in training, coaching, and mentoring the front-line sales to balance that between both the drive for near-term growth and building longer-term capabilities for the field.
5. They lead from the top. These companies invest in and gain commitment from the organization and are able to build their vision and their plans from the executive and from the top down. They also invest in change management and implement change from the ground up.
Looking at these five practices, there’s one area that stands out wherein sales leaders differentiate themselves. It is the deployment and use of technology and analytics. With ever-developing trends in technology, sales executives continue to invest in deploying analytics and technology to make their sales team more productive both in the front end of sales – digital channels, e-commerce capabilities – and in the back end with capabilities for their planning and sales operations.
Jeff Schomburger, the global sales leader of Procter and Gamble mentioned that the fundamentals of selling haven’t changed, as well as the questions being asked. It’s just that we have much more data now and ways of answering those questions The need for basic selling capabilities, the solution-selling capabilities, the relationship-building, and the empathy that a salesperson brings to the table are not going away.
So there’s still a need for companies and organizations to be investing in tools that can help their sales team to be more productive and leverage the technology that currently exists, in order to bring those insights to their customers more effectively and connect to them faster.
We’ve come a long way from the old-school concept of outside sales. Tech-savvy sales professionals who use CRMs and sales acceleration technologies for sales processes are taking the limelight. Technology has now become the single best driver of innovation in the sales industry.
What is Sales Acceleration Technology?
Sales Acceleration Technology is a category of software that is used to maximize sales revenue by improving sales effectiveness. This also involves automating sales processes and increasing the velocity of sales to help sales representatives identify the best prospects, connect with them more successfully and have more intelligent conversations during the selling process.
A research conducted by McKinsey Global Institute showed that up to 40 percent of sales activities can be automated– which is tremendous if you think about it. As technology continues to grow every day, and if we think about technology evolving, that number can get up to 50 percent.
The opportunity with analytics and digital in sales is gigantic, and we’ve seen that in the results of companies that have started to deploy these capabilities in their sales. As we move forward, we’ll see more and more of those solutions adopted in sales, beyond the traditional applications of analytics and tools – such as customer relationship management or basic forecasting – to more advanced functionalities. That’s going to enable sales teams to unleash a level of productivity that’s going to be higher than anything we’ve seen in the past and, at the same time, allow them to do what they do best, which is selling and spending time on selling activities rather than on some of the back-office tasks that may be taking their time away.
One of the most popular features of sales acceleration technologies is auto-dialers. These are electronic devices or technological software that automatically dials telephone numbers and once answered, it either plays a recorded message or connects a call to a live person.
Dialers are most commonly used in call centers to automate the process of dialing to external phone numbers. Although auto-dialers have been around since the 1980’s, they have been made anew and have been given an improved form.
Read more about auto-dialers here: https://www.tenfold.com/dialer/auto-dialer
What is a Progressive Dialer?
A progressive dialer is an automated dialing system which presents the contact information to the agent prior to dialing the phone number. Depending on the pace of the contact center’s operations, an agent is given an ample amount of time to review the contact information shown on the computer screen before the dialer automatically places the call. This ensures a constant pace of calling while allowing agents to prepare for a call.
The progressive dialer runs through the calling lists provided by the company. It waits until an agent is free to take a phone call, and then progresses to dial the next number on behalf of the agent.
How do Progressive Dialers Help Sales Teams?
Since most sales transactions nowadays are made over the phone, sales agents must make the best use of their time by keeping the phone calls rolling and minimizing downtime.
Individual agents manually dialing out each call, waiting for the call to connect, and continue scrolling down through the call lists, leads to the increase of downtime causing a low level of efficiency.
That’s where progressive dialing software come into view. In order to maintain a high level of efficiency and output, agents must keep a steady stream of communication flowing. Having an automated system in place helps reduce the downtime which simply translates to less wasted calls and time, progressive calling, increased sales, and of course, easier lead management. Progressive dialer for sales agents will automatically dial out from a list of leads one after the other to maintain a constant flow of calls and reduce the downtime in between. This also means that the burden of agents manually dialing phone numbers are no more.
The Verdict: Progressive Dialers – to have or not to have?
After reviewing how progressive dialers work, we can truly say that progressive dialers are a must for sales teams and contact centers. Not only do progressive dialers increase the productivity of people who make outbound telephone calls, but it also provides comprehensive management reporting, so that calling work can be better managed.
By automating the process of dialing calls, agents spend less time managing their call lists and more time talking to customers. With automation also comes reporting and with reporting comes management control, which ensures a sure-fire way of increasing team productivity and efficiency.
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Matt Goldman
Matt Goldman is a Content Marketer/Social Media Strategist for Tenfold. His writing has focused on social selling, marketing, as well as gamification.
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