How to Have More Conversations & Increase Revenue

When sales reps are skilled at selling and targeting the right prospects, having more conversations almost always powers pipeline and revenue growth. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to go hire a lot of sales reps. The reps you have can do far better with the right tools and strategy.

According to TOPO’s Sales Development Technology Report, that the average rep is dialing 18 prospects for each conversation they have. By those numbers, reps would need to be dialing 108 prospects daily in order to have 6 conversations. But we know that most sales development reps (SDRs) don’t make that many dials. In fact, according to the Bridge Group’s SaaS Inside Sales Survey Report, the average rep makes an average of only 33 dials per day (down form 38 in 2012). This is a problem. Because if SDRs can’t connect with enough prospects, they can’t book enough meetings and create enough opportunities for account executives. And when account executives don’t a have a steady stream of sales-qualified leads to work, they can’t make their numbers. The result: a bad quarter. And as all salespeople know, one bad sales quarter can make a bad sales year.

Here are some ways that our customers are currently using Revenue.io to maximize connection rates (and opportunities and revenue as a result).

Use Call Metrics to Ensure Optimal Outreach Efforts

Revenue.io enables you to track how many conversations reps are having each day.

Even though the average inside sales rep only makes 38 dials, that doesn’t mean that this number should be used as your benchmark. The correct number of dials is going to vary depending on industry, but we’ve found that the sweet spot for SDRs tends to lie somewhere between 50 and 100. One way to motivate reps to dial more prospects is by setting activity goals (commonly called SLAs). If you’ve found that top performing reps are making around 65 dials a day, you could set an activity goal of 65 dials per day. We’ve found that some companies offer compensation bonuses to reps that consistently meet activity goals. Revenue.io’s dashboards give managers instant visibility into how many dials reps are making every day, making it easy to see whether reps are meeting or falling short of goals.

Dial More Efficiently

Our Intelligent Dialer for Salesforce gives reps a productivity boost that can help them hit those goals with ease. Thanks to our Next Call feature, reps can quickly call down prioritized lead lists in Salesforce with powerful and fast one-click dialing. According to the Bridge Group, simply using dialing software results in 22% more conversations daily.

Dial from Local Area Codes

Local Presence enables you to dial prospects from numbers with local area codes

While dialing more prospects can yield more conversations, our customers consistently rave about how many more conversations they are having thanks to Local Presence. Local Presence is a feature that enables reps to automatically dial prospects from a number with a local area code. This is powerful because a study from technology researcher Software Advice found that prospects are up to 400% more likely to answer calls from local numbers than from toll-free numbers.

Are you interested in connecting with more prospects and driving more sales revenue? Check out our complete guide to sales software to find out how your business can benefit from sales acceleration technology.