Call Center Auto Dialers

Inside sales is the process of collecting leads, making contacts, and closing sales from a remote location – typically over the telephone. This differs in several ways from outside sales, where sales professionals meet with their prospects face to face. Because it is different inside sales professionals need to utilize sales technologies in order to be the most effective, and compensate for the personal touch. An auto dialer is one such technology that is essential to productive inside sales call centers.

Call centers need to make as many quality calls in a day as they possibly can. A high number of outbound calls also allow call centers to contact individual leads numerous times, if necessary, in order to convert as many customers as possible. Many call centers use ratio auto dialers or predictive auto dialers because of the high level of calls that can be made each day with these solutions.

Ratio and predictive dialers both burn through a large number of leads very quickly because both types of dialers dial more leads than there are available sales agents to take those calls. This is done to account for the number of calls that are not answered or busy. These auto dialers also come with a percentage of dropped calls. For B2B call centers that have a more complex sales process and typically a higher profit on each call, dropped leads are not an option. In this case a power dialer is the only type of auto dialer that should be used.

Power Dialers call only one lead for each sales agent at a time. When a call starts to ring it is routed through to the agent. If the answering machine picks up the auto dialer can be instructed to leave a prerecorded message while the sales agent takes another call. Since these B2B sales are complex and could require a significant amount of time, the power dialer will not begin dialing other leads until the sales agent finishes his call. This solves the problem of burning through leads, dropped calls, and lag time.

Companies using a power dialer can expect to triple their daily call volume compared to manually dialing, but cannot dial the same volume of leads that a company using a ratio or predictive dialer can in a day, which for B2B companies is not necessary. What this kind of auto dialer may lack in shear call volume it more than makes up in its ability to provide each lead with a quality sales experience.

How to use an Auto Dialer... aka Don't be a rude Telemarketer

What can separate a Remote Sales Professional from a Telemarketer?

Even those of us who work in telephony software can find ourselves annoyed with telemarketers. Perhaps we are even more annoyed with the tactless tactics these sales people use because we see how telesales should be done. We know that there are types of auto dialers that fix many of the “problems” with remote selling by telephone.

Telemarketing originated in the 1950’s, and by the 70’s telemarketing companies were experiencing a tremendous amount of success. By the 1990’s telemarketing was often seen as a public nuisance, and by the end of the decade legislative action was taken with the implementation of the “Do Not Call” registry.

There are several reasons why telemarketers fell out of favor with the American public. These calls were often placed at the least opportune times, right about the time dinner was being served and the family was gathered together. Telesales professionals were often aggressive and refused to respect their contacts wishes not to purchase what they were selling.

On top of this is added the insult of the “telemarketer pause.” This occurs when the telesales company uses a predictive auto dialer. A predictive dialer calls more numbers than available sales agents. It does this based on the amount of dropped calls or busy signals it has been encountering, as well as how much time the sales agents are spending on an average call. Since there is no guarantee that there won’t be more calls answered than there are sales agents to take those calls a percentage of calls trigger a telemarketer pause. This is when there is no agent on the line when the contact answers – the phone is dead.

It is a possibility that such a call will be routed to a sales agent shortly, but in these cases the person called is expected to remain on the line and wait. Most often these contacts simply hang up the phone. With practices like these it is no wonder that we all find ourselves annoyed with these telemarketers.

Responsible remote sales professionals opt for a different kind of auto dialer – a Power Dialer. A power dialer only calls one number at a time for each available sales representative; there is no opportunity for a telemarketer pause to occur. This kind of auto dialer not only satisfies the call center’s need to make more calls but also gives the potential customers being called courtesy that a predictive auto dialer cannot.

It is up to the sales people to deal with the problems of over aggressiveness internally.

Why do I need software to do telemarketing?

Businesses that practice remote sales need to use telemarketing software in order to be productive. Telemarketing is now used by many retail businesses, and these remote call centers should be organized, efficient, customer service oriented, and above all—profitable. Telemarketing software has been developed to help the growing number of businesses reach these goals. The use of telemarketing software provides a competitive edge in this market by allowing companies to get more done.

The auto dialer is a type of telemarketing software. Dialers call through a list of leads or contacts. In between calls the sales representative stays logged into the dialer system and the dialer continues to calls leads for him. This allows the dialer to immediately route new calls to the sales person. Over the course of a typical work day each sales agent is able to make more calls and spend more of their day selling. Compared to dialing manually sales agents are able to make as many as four times the amount of sales calls when using a dialer.

Contacts can be uploaded directly from a CRM and many dialers have the ability to integrate with the top CRMs. CRMs (customer relationship managers) also track all of the processes associated with remote sales. From the information screens within the CRM calls can be made instantly to contacts and clients. With this click-to-call technology a single mouse click will connect a sales agent to the specified contact.

Email messaging is an important feature available with telemarketing software. Remote sales professionals spend up to a third of their day following up on the calls they made that day. This involves sending emails with additional information on products or promotions. Email messaging technology cuts this time drastically by automating the process. Email templates are designed before the sales calls even take place and can be tested to see what email best achieves the desired action. When an email needs to be sent, it can be done during the actual phone call from within the CRM. By cutting out the time it takes to follow–up, sales agents can spend more time on the phone making calls and closing sales.

The investment in these software programs is worth it to any organization that expects to compete in the remote sales market.

An Online CRM will earn Money for an Inside Sales company

A company is performing inside sales if it a company that sales its services or products from a remote location, meaning they interact with clients using the telephone and internet instead of face-to-face. These companies often cut costs associated with travel and store front upkeep while having access to a more reliable stream of potential clients. If a company’s own marketing efforts are not enough to bring in the desired amount of leads, they can be purchased from lead generation sources and divided up among sales representatives.

Like any type of sales, inside sales requires several steps from start to finish. From lead generation all the way through closing the sale, many different sales agents may interact with any particular lead or client. In order to track all of the interactions that a contact has with the company, and to plan what needs to be accomplished with that lead next, CRMs were developed. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and these systems are the brains behind inside sales. Particularly, an online CRM saves an inside sales organization time and increases their sales volume.

The difference between an online CRM and other kinds is how convenient it is for the companies that use it. Instead of having to purchase and download software on each computer used, the CRM is hosted completely online. This is especially helpful for companies where employees work from home and also a time saver for companies who use a call center. The information within the online CRM can be accessed anywhere the internet is available.

All CRMs benefit from the integration of other telephony tools. This integration creates the most powerful and convenient package of software solutions for the sales agents. Power dialers are a very important telephony tool that should be fully integrated with the CRM. Dialers double or triple the amount of calls sales agents can make in one business day. The prerecording of voice messages, as well as the function to automatically leave them on answering machines, is a time saving integration that also increases the quality of the messages and impressions sales agents leave. Automatic enrollment of new contacts into a campaign, a predetermined series of tasks that the online CRM will automatically schedule to be completed at specified intervals, is another software solution that greatly increases the productivity of sales professionals.

Venturing into inside sales offers many benefits to any sales organizations. Researching, purchasing, and using a trusted online CRM can help increase contact volume and sales closure in those companies.

Automatic Call Distribution and what it can do for your business

Inside sales operations spend a most of their time calling people, at least that’s what they should be doing. These outbound calls are often what receive the single greatest amount of a sales representative’s time. Inbound calls are usually more valuable than the individual outbound calls because they can represent existing clients or those contacts who are actively seeking out a company’s product or service.

There are telephony software solutions that increase the efficiency of receiving these inbound calls regardless of whether an inside sales business uses in-house agents or if those agents work remotely. One of these solutions is ACD, or Automatic Call Distribution. The purpose of this telephony tool is not only to allow sales agents to receive inbound calls, but also to route those calls to the right personnel automatically.

ACD call routing works well in combination with toll free phone numbers. Managers of the system can establish which toll free numbers should be answered by which sales representatives. This can be determined by which geographic location the toll free number is advertised in, by which department that toll free number is associated with, or any other delineation. By automatically routing calls based on which sales agents can best responds instantly improves customer relations. In the event that there are no designated sales reps that call is not dropped. Instead, the Automatic Call Distribution system can be directed to route that incoming call to a fail–over number. This fail-over number could be anything from the general office line to voice messaging systems. ACD could even route the call through to one of the agents’ personal cell phones. There is no need for any inbound call to be unanswered or dropped when using ACD call routing.

This telephony solution often offers many quality control features. Usually this includes the option to record calls being completed. These recordings can be stored along with every other bit of data associated with a particular caller. These calls can be retrieved and played back if ever the need arises.

All of this makes it faster and easier to connect incoming calls to the right people. By decreasing customer wait time ACD raises customer satisfaction. When this is linked to an outbound dialer all agents that receive inbound calls can also be actively making outbound calls. ACD removes the slow, down times that can occur in a business day, generating the greatest amount of calls made and sales closed.

Dialer Software that meets the Demands of Inside Sales

Several problems are faced by inside sales teams. Those problems may include—what can be done to increase productivity by making more calls and closing more sales? How is a high level of quality and customer care going to be assured? What measures are going to be taken to ensure that all promises made to contacts will be fulfilled? There are probably numerous answers for each of these problems, but to remain efficient a sales team needs to use one simple and effective solution to meet all of these needs. Power dialer software is such a solution.

Power dialer software, in its simplest form, is a program that automatically dials phone numbers from a contact list for a sales agent. This alone decreases the amount of time spent on each individual call and increase the volume of calls each sales person is able to make in a typical work day. Power dialers are designed to help a sales representative to make three hundred dials in a day, compared to a manual dialing average that is around seventy five.

Phone dialer software increases productivity further when that dialer is integrated with email or voice messaging solutions. From the dialer software previously composed emails and voice messages can automatically be sent. This frees the sales agent from using valuable calling time waiting to leave messages himself on voice mail systems or sending various different emails to many different customers at the end of his or her work day. A typical sales person spends only five or six hours of their day making phone calls and upwards of three hours sending emails or other messages to those contacts. Phone dialer software cuts this time down to a fraction of what it commonly takes, all with only a couple of mouse clicks.

Using carefully constructed emails and voice messages is also one of the steps dialer software takes to ensuring quality control. Instead of fumbling over their messages sales agents can record one in their own voice that says exactly what they and their employers want said. An additional way phone dialers assure quality from a sales team’s performance is with optional call recording. By recording and monitoring sales calls training can be planned to strengthen the sales agents and help them be more efficient in their job.

Each of these functions of well designed dialer software works together to create an easy to use system that meets the demands of inside sales.

The Dialer

Historically sales were done with a store front that customers could visit or by door to door vendors bringing their wares and services directly to their customers. Recently shifts in sales practices have led to the development of “Inside Sales”, a very different focus with very different tools.

Inside sales differ from traditional, or outside sales, in several ways. The clearest distinction is how customers are encountered. Inside sales are often conducted from an office or call center, through the use of a computer and telephone. Sometimes visits or appointments are set up for a face to face visit, but the phone becomes the primary tool of communication.

Numerous different kinds of hardware and software have been developed to aid in the process of inside sales. Dialers have emerged as a staple in the inside sales industry. Dialers, or dialer software, are programs that monitor, record, alter, and streamline the calls that are made by any single sales agent. Not all dialers are the same, but many fall into a few basic categories.

Predictive dialers are designed to give increased control and flexibility to sales teams to improve the amount of talk time each agent has over the course of a workday. A ratio dialer works by calling a set amount of leads per available sales agent. This call per agent ratio takes into account that some calls are never answered by the lead. Ratio dialers can leave a prerecorded message when they encounter a voice mail system, and never bother the sales agent with the machine. The salesperson’s time is spent only with prospects.

A second type of dialer is the auto dialer. With auto dialers, the dialer will call through a list of leads automatically, patching them through to the sales representative as the call starts to ring. If a call is not answered the salesperson can choose to leave a voice message. An auto dialer reduces the amount of dropped calls from unavailable representatives or pauses between when the client answers and when the sales person connects to the call that may occur with a ratio dialer.

Power dialers are a third kind of dialer used in inside sales. A Power dialer can call through a list of numbers, similar to an auto dialer, but a power dialer gives more control to the call agent. The agent is able to control the rate of calling, by calling the agent as it makes a call to a lead. The salesperson answers the call, which is then patched through to the lead. Power dialers also have the ability to leave voice messages, emails, and faxes if a call is not answered.

All dialers are designed to increase productivity of inside sales departments. They all require a preprogrammed list of leads, but each have their own nuances to allow dialers to meet the needs of the diverse inside sales community.