May 8, 2009

Four telephony software solutions that increase lead management

Proper lead generation and response management requires a whole collection of complementary communication and telephony software tools. These lead management solutions work to better the sales experience during the entire sales process.

A power dialer helps you reach more leads quicker. Dialing manually sales agents generally average thirty to fifty calls in a standard work day. With a power dialer sales representatives can contact one to two hundred leads in a workday. In addition, when a power dialer is integrated in other telephony software such as an online CRM, the dialer is able to organize, guide, and prompt the sales agents using it to follow a pre-defined sales process.

Generally, a sales rep who spends five or six hours a day on the phone will need to spend two or three hours off the phone fulfilling promises to provide proposals, faxes and emails. Email or fax messaging telephony software provides a sales team with templates for all of these collateral processes. Sales agents are then able to fulfill these tasks while they are still on the phone with a lead. Sales team members can then spend a full day contacting newly generated lead, and all without sacrificing any customer service.

The addition of inbound outbound call blending to a telephony software suite allows sales reps to address customer needs even further. With this software solution every sales agent can be actively calling newly generated leads. These lists of leads are programmed into the dialer, and they are automatically routed through to the sales agent. With inbound outbound call blending, these outbound dialing sales reps can also receive calls. When an inbound call is received the dialer patches that call through to the sales agent instead of dialing a new lead for them. This ensures that every existing customer is adequately taken care of without sacrificing important time reaching out to prospective clients.

Voice messaging is another important piece of telephony software. It is not rare for sales agents to sit through many voice mail messages while dialing leads. With a voice messaging system this wasted time is eliminated. In order to work a message needs to be recorded by the sales rep. This message is then saved in the voice messaging system. When the agent gets a lead’s voice mail system, the sales agent can simply direct the dialer to continue to another call automatically, and leave that prerecorded message. While the telephony software completes this task the sales agent can continue on to another call.

This is not an exhausting list of telephony software solutions. There are many different tools available for the sales professional that sells remotely.