Outbound Dialer Software: 7 Must-Have B2B Dialer Features

When you’re choosing a dialer, reps will offer endless lists of features. Some of these are truly necessary, while others are just pretty ornamentation that won’t actually help your team reach its quota.

That’s why we’ve put together a list of the seven most important dialer features. While this list is by no means comprehensive, consider it to be our desert-island feature list, if you will. So if we had to make all our sales calls from a beach (which doesn’t sound half bad…) we’d want to make sure our dialer had:

1. Intelligent lead routing

One element of calls that’s often ignored, but that can help determine the outcome of a call before it even begins, is whether the people on either end of the line are a good match for each other. We’ve all been on the receiving end of a bad match when we’ve called a customer help line and been told that we need to be transferred to a different department because the person we’re talking to can’t actually help us. But that would have been a much better experience if we’d been matched to the right person the first time around, wouldn’t it?

While not all lead routing situations are that black-and-white, It’s simply a fact of life that certain reps are better suited to certain leads. One of the best ways that a dialer can help improve your conversion rates is by making sure that every caller is paired to the right rep, so that they can have the best conversation possible. Some of the criteria you can use with intelligent lead routing to optimize your lead flow include:

• Time zone or country
• Language skills
• Product or service expertise
• Account owner
• Sales territory

2. Good lead prioritization

When you’re a sales rep and you have a lot of calls to make, prioritization is the name of the game. You need to consider how important an account is, the best person to call from that account, whether they’ve interacted with your site or shown 3rd party intent recently – and if so, how recently – in order to be able to decide which calls are most worthy of your time. Often, there are even more factors to consider too, such as whether you’d be calling the person at a good time (particularly if they’re not in your time zone), or if they interacted with a campaign that the marketing team is spending a lot of money on, for instance.

Lead prioritization can feel overwhelming when you leave it to individual reps to figure out the next best action, but it can make or break your sales strategy. That’s why having a dialer that can do automated lead prioritization is invaluable, because then reps are not only freed from the burden of having to figure it out themselves, but then your whole company is more likely to succeed as you increase the number of valuable conversations that your sales team has.

3. Inbound lead visibility

Imagine that a lead has come to your site and expressed immediate interest in your products by filling out a demo or pricing form, or by reading a particularly high-value piece of content. They should be contacted by your reps immediately! Right?

In theory, yes. But a lead that your reps don’t know about is a lead that’s not going to get contacted. It’s as simple as that. To make sure that high-quality leads like the one we just described don’t get lost in the shuffle, make sure that your dialer has a feature that accounts for this scenario and makes the leads easy to see and respond to.

This feature is sometimes bundled up in a lead routing system, like discussed in point #1. If you use a lead routing system like this, you can set it so all inbound leads are sent to a different rep on each day or during a certain time. That way the rep knows a period of time they are “on-duty” and can watch for new additions.

Fun fact: Revenue.io Hot Leads can make inbound leads even more visible, with instant lead alerts and notifications. When a lead becomes hot, they’ll automatically appear in the assigned rep’s RingDNA Dialer with complete context about their source, as well as important additional information. All the rep has to do is click to call, and they have the ability to pull up the proper call script right in the dialer.

4. Local presence dialing

If your reps are placing calls but they’re not getting enough people to pick up, the fault may lie with their phone number (and by extension with their dialer, which should definitely be optimizing that phone number for more conversations!).

Far more prospects will pick up their phone when they see a local number in their caller ID. Tools like Revenue.io’s Local Presence can empower your sales team to automatically dial both domestic and international prospects from local numbers. Whether you’re dialing prospects in San Francisco, New York, London or Prague, your prospects will always see a local number in their caller ID.

When considering a local dialing feature, it’s also important to make sure that return calls are routed to the right rep or call queue. After all, sometimes prospects don’t pick up their phone. While some local area dialing solutions route return callers to a general sales queue, Revenue.io will automatically route callers to the exact rep that dialed them.

5. Call compliance with GDPR, TCPA, etc.

While this is less of a feature per se, having call software that helps you to manage your compliance with all applicable laws is non-negotiable. After all, if you’re working hard to win deals but all the revenue goes to legal fees, then you’re no better off than you started.

To make sure that you don’t land in that position, make sure that your legal team thoroughly vets any dialer that you’re seriously considering (don’t use this blog as official legal advice!). But to get you pointed in the right direction, look out for dialers that can automatically turn call recording off and on based on the prospect’s location, and that can play an automated recording alert or remind reps to mention the recording if they don’t bring it up at first. Auto-dialing can be a red flag, since the TCPA specifically bans certain types of auto-dialers. Similarly, you should make sure that your dialer is GDPR, TCPA, and SOC-II compliant, and helps you manage your company’s compliance as well.

6. Revenue Intelligence

When you’re considering a dialer, also consider the flow information from the calls into the rest of your tech stack. Will you need to manually log important information into Salesforce on or after calls? Or will your dialer handle that for you?

Ideally, a dialer should provide you with revenue intelligence by recording vital data and surfacing insights with dashboards and reporting to help you get the most out of every call. Calls, video meetings, and more should be automatically logged into Salesforce, at the very least.

If you or your reps have to manually log important information into Salesforce on or after calls, you should consider switching to a sales dialer that has built-in technology for recording vital data. Transforming raw data into revenue intelligence is essential for growth. If reps are doing this work manually, you’re wasting valuable time they could have spent selling – especially when you consider that reps spend less than 36% of their time selling and that logging activities is one of the biggest ways that their time is eaten up.

But if you have a computer doing the work for you behind the scenes, not only will reps be able to dedicate more time to winning deals, but you’ll also eliminate the potential for human error that occurs when reps manually log their calls. That way, you’ll be able to trust that you’re getting the most accurate, most meaningful data.

7. Native conversation intelligence

Conversation intelligence has been growing in popularity, with Revenue.io research finding that adoption of conversation intelligence technology increased the most of any software category in 2022, with 38% of companies reporting using CI versus 25% the prior year. In addition, conversation intelligence is a planned investment for a further 17% of companies in 2022.

Conversation intelligence solutions now help you to understand conversations in the context of dynamic deals, not just as stand-alone calls. B2B deals can be complicated, multistep interactions, and conversation intelligence integrates with other communication sources (such as texting and video calls) to give you the full picture.

Some companies sell conversation intelligence solutions a la carte, but if you’re in the market for a dialer, it’s wise to make sure that your dialer can provide native conversation intelligence to make sure that your tech stack stays clean and that your conversation intelligence is fully compatible with your dialer (it can also help to keep costs down).

And there you have it! Those are our seven ride-or-die features that we strongly recommend you have in your B2B sales dialer. For even more in-depth info on what you should look for in a dialer, check out The Sales Leader’s Guide to High-Performing Dialers for Salesforce.