Telemarketing Software Featured Article

If you manage a sales team, think about it: what do your sales personnel spend most of the day doing? If your organization is like most others, they spend most of their day doing administrative work, dialing the phone, listening to voicemail, leaving messages, rooting around for sales enablement material and catching up on customers’ purchasing histories. The amount of time they spend actually selling is often quite small.

According to Docurated's State of Sales Productivity 2015, the average salesperson spends only one-third of his or her time selling. It doesn’t take a master sales manager to recognize that if more time could be devoted to selling, sales goals would be easier to meet. Often, it’s a matter of old, outdated or redundant technology holding sales personnel back. It might be manually dialing the phone, hunting through multiple databases for information, or a lack of integration between the telephony platform and the customer relationship management (CRM) system.

“The one universal truth is that no matter how great your service is, the business needs an efficient sales process, wrote Christina Mylnski in a recent blog post for VanillaSoft. “The trick is to find an ideal inside sales software that emphasizes efficiency, usefulness and productivity.”

Mylnski recommends that companies investigate queue-based lead management solutions that use result codes, disposition values and customizable routing logic to propel the process of presenting the next-best lead automatically, eliminating the need to hunt and peck. In addition, auto-dialing – either progressive or preview – and voice features can provide both volume and quality so sales people have more time to achieve their sales goals.

Many sales platforms also include extra features that can speed productivity, such as email management. Email marketing helps sales personnel stay in front of customers, prospects and everyone in between by integrating emails with personalized calls. The result is that sales organizations are in a better position to build effective strategies to educate and build brands to increase contact responses.

Queue-based routing and lead integration tools allow sales teams to use a pre-defined routing template or customize their own. Next-best-call routing allows the sales team to perform at historically high productivity levels thanks to better call results, more contacts and improved workflows.

“Automating your sales workflows and lead management strategy is critical to improving revenue generation,” wrote Mylnski. “[It] helps assist with the automation of lead flows. Instead of working from a list view that must be manually selected to contact a lead, the default view for a salesperson is based on prioritization and logic defined by management.”

To complete the smooth workflow, an ideal lead management platform can be integrated with CRM and other suites of software commonly used by sales teams, including, Docusign, Microsoft (News - Alert) Office and Adobe. Ultimately, the result is a sales team that spends less time preparing to call leads, customers and prospects, and more time speaking with them. Sales personnel can cut down on errors, duplicated efforts and wasted time, which means they can spend more time selling.