3 Reasons Sales Development Reps Need Specialized Sales Dialers

If you’re new to sales management, and you’ve seen your peers discussing things like auto dialer software and intelligent dialers for sales reps, you’re probably wondering what all the fuss is about. What’s wrong with a regular VoIP system, you might say?  All your employees already use it. That’s a little like suggesting that your accountants do their job using only Excel, when advanced accounting software is available to help your accountants not only do their jobs better, but also improve their productivity.

The truth is, in order for sales teams to be competitive, they need better tools. Your reps have to be faster, better at prioritization and have far better insight than the traditional phone system that works so well for the rest of your employees.

Can your reps dial prospects from their regular desk phones? Of course. But when’s the last time that a traditional business phone on its own made your sales reps more successful? Specialized sales dialers, on the other hand, can give your reps a powerful competitive advantage. They can not only accelerate productivity (giving your reps more sales time), but also lift connection rates and make reps’ conversations more successful. That equates to more revenue.

Here are three good reasons why sales development reps need specialized dialers to stay competitive.

Desk Phones Don’t Help Reps Close Deals

Reps often spend valuable time researching prospects before calling them. During this process, they might search for information from a slew of sources including Salesforce, Twitter, news sites and more. Then, during a call, it’s common to have to toggle between a barrage of browser windows. But thankfully, sales has evolved. Dialers can now trigger CTI screen pops that deliver contextual prospect data in aggregate from a variety of data sources. This can help  slash the time reps spend researching prospects before calls. Viewing contextual data from a single location can also help reps have more successful outbound (and inbound) phone calls.

It’s Harder to Connect With Valuable Prospects

Your prospects are just less likely to pick up sales calls than they once were. Not only are your prospects texting more, but people are generally wary about picking up numbers they don’t recognize. When you get a call from a toll-free number, you probably think it’s a sales call, right? And when you get a call from a long-distance area code, what’s your first thought? Mine is that it’s a wrong number, and I let it go to voicemail.

However, yesterday, my cell phone lit up with a number I didn’t recognize. I picked it up anyway, because the number came from a local area code. I thought it might be an important call rather than a random sales call.

It turned out to be the local moving company I had just hired.  But if it HAD been a random sales prospector, I would have still answered the call since it was coming from a local area code. And that rep would have had the opportunity to pitch to me directly instead of leaving me a voicemail. Local presence dialers give sales development reps the power to automatically dial prospects from numbers with local area codes. This can enable them to spend more of their time actually qualifying and selling to leads.

Sales Managers Need Accurate Call Data to Coach Teams to Success

Managers need accurate call data to successfully make revenue predictions and coach their teams to success. That’s probably why you invested in Salesforce to begin with. But a nightmare scenario (that’s all-too common) is that after implementing Salesforce, reps still don’t enter call data in their CRM. When your reps get off a sales call, they are probably going to want to do one of two things. Either engage in a follow-up task (sending a lead a price quote, etc.), or they’re going to want to get on the phone and dial another lead. Logging calls in Salesforce is just never going to be high on a list of reps’ preferred activities. That’s why it’s so important to use dialers that automatically capture call data and even entire call recordings in Salesforce. Not only will reps get more time to sell, but managers can get an up-to-the-moment view of call activities.

Want to learn more about how to successfully recruit and manage a sales development team? Download our latest eBook How to Fast-Track Revenue With a Dedicated Sales Development Team!