TMCnews Featured Article

The world has changed for outbound customer sales efforts. State and federal legislation governing telemarketing was the challenge of the last decade, but the changes didn’t stop there. Frequent changes in Google’s (News - Alert) algorithms have also been a factor, as have social media and customer expectations of daily new content.

In addition, the negative effects of a slow economy keep lingering. Thanks to budget cuts in many companies, legacy software is still a factor, and many outbound sales departments are having to make do with outdated solutions that reduce efficiency and effectiveness, particularly when it comes to the need to improve outbound results by tying dialers to customer relationship management (CRM) and social media.

As TMC (News - Alert) reported earlier this year, “Social media has become essential for the success of any marketing campaign. Organizations looking to enhance sales turn to social media tools to spread the message to a larger group of customers and to generate leads through effective interactions.”

Dialers are still a critical component of any outbound sales campaign. They allow agents and sales personnel to make more connections per hour, and they increase the chances that the contacts will result in a sale. What they need to do in 2014, however, is ensure that the dialers they use can “speak” to other solutions to add context to the outbound sales efforts.

Dialing solutions such as OPC Marketing’s SpitFire have been proven to greatly increase outbound dialing volume, boosting productivity by as much as 50 percent. Companies that ensure that they are using quality leads – those gathered from social media are an excellent example – in combination with a dialing solution can improve their prospects even further.

By using contextual information in conjunction with a dialer, outbound sales organizations can not only boost productivity, but increase their chances of making a connection that will result in a sale.

“Draw referral traffic from existing relationships with real people and organizations,” wrote Louis Foong for Business2Community recently. “This way you won’t have to depend solely on the search engines to send you new leads.”

Preview dialing, a functionality offered by SpitFire’s dialers, allows the agent to view the information in the contact record before he or she picks up the call. By ensuring contact records are as rich as possible with information, agents are able to focus their time on calls likely to yield the best results. It’s a way to ensure that agents are using twenty-first century resources to sell to twenty-first century customers.