Telemarketing Software Featured Article

When it comes to having a favorite work task to do, cold calling, or outbound telemarketing, usually doesn’t show up high on the list. Let’s face it … it’s often boring, thankless and requires you to speak with sometimes rude people. Under the best circumstances, it means reaching a lot of voicemail boxes. For sales teams, it’s fair to say it’s one of those tasks that often gets shuttled to the bottom of the to-do list.

But without cold calling, many organizations would never have any sales leads. Since the purpose of business is to sell, this is rather counter-productive. Skillful cold-calling keeps the pipeline full and builds the customer list. Yet knowing this doesn’t make it any easier, according to a recent article by Craig Ferrara writing for Business2Community.

“Those of us who dial for dollars understand those days where it feels like the phone weighs about 150 pounds and it was nearly impossible to get into any kind of rhythm,” writes Ferrara. “I know when I wasn’t in ‘the flow,’ I typically would find any excuse not to make a call, but any good inside sales rep understands that, as much as we try to put cold calling off for later, it’s always going to be a requirement of the job.”

But how do you get “in the flow” and stay there?

Nothing helps make a task easier than having some success with it. Manually dialed cold calls from bad lists aren’t the way to get there. It helps to have the right systems and technologies in place. A telemarketing solution that is integrated with the company’s customer relationship management (CRM) database can arm outbound salespeople with better intelligence, which helps them offer a better pitch. Properly scrubbed lists can eliminate dead numbers and too-cold-to-bother-with old leads.

While the auto dialer has been around for decades, many sales organizations don’t use them, because they don’t consider themselves to be telemarketers. What they’re missing is a massive boost in productivity. According to telemarketing solutions provider VanillaSoft, a good dialer product that increases the likelihood of connecting to the right people at the right time can boost a sales team's call productivity by 50 percent or more and handle the distribution of leads to sales people. An appointment-setting feature can move the leads onto the next level and ensure that good leads aren’t dropped or lost.