Embed your dialer into your CRM

A dialer is a type of telephony software that enables a sales agent to call a large volume of leads in a business day. These dialers have many incarnations such as auto dialers, predictive dialers, ratio dialers, and the efficient power dialers. Many dialers operate by calling numerous numbers at once, and they all serve to move a sales rep through a pre-programmed list of leads. All dialers operate at their best when they are used in conjunction with a CRM or ERP.

ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planners) and CRMs (Customer Relationship Managers) create, store and manage important company information, including the contact information on all leads and clients. Some popular providers of ERPs and CRMs include RightNow Technologies, InsideSales.com, Salesnet, and SalesForce.com. The ERP or CRM a company uses becomes a vital part of their sales process. A dialer should be fully integrated to work cooperatively with these systems.

The combining of the data management system with the telephone dialer enables tightly-coupled data management, tracking and analytics with an organization’s telemarketing efforts. The software combination allows quick and easy transfer of important information which powers other telephony business solutions. These include the automatic capturing of leads from submitted web forms, the routing of those leads to the best suited remote sales agent to accept that call, the automatic sending of an email or fax message by a sales agent to a lead while they are on the phone together, and the recording of important follow up tasks and dates associated with each contact.

Some providers of hosted dialer solutions also provide their own CRMs or ERPs. An alternative to a hosted solution that still provides both a CRM and ERP is a company whose telephone dialer can be fully embedded within another company’s management system.

By using a hosted dialer, a remote sales organization gains the telephony power tools associated with the dialer solution, but does not have to develop their own dialer software or download another company’s software onto their computers. Instead the software is housed on the host provider’s network, and accessed by the businesses acting as their clients.

Depending on the combination of data management and telephone dialer systems chosen, reports consistently find that the volume of sales made by any particular remote sales professional can increase three or four times than before. In addition, the ratio of contacts successfully made and contacts that become conversions increase as these telemarketing solutions are used.