Telemarketing Software Featured Article

Inside sales or telemarketing is already one of the most challenging functions of most organizations. Building a rapport with a prospect in person is hard enough, doing it over the telephone or through digital communications channels is extra challenging, particularly for a sales rep and a manually dialed phone.

Luckily, telemarketing software has advanced significantly in recent years, helping to make the job of inside sales easier, boosting the chances of success. Many of today’s Web-based telemarketing solutions offer advanced dialer features (to increase connections and chances of success) and integration with enablement solutions such as customer relationship management (CRM). Solutions providers such as VanillaSoft continue to refine their products, adding features that help sales reps communicate with prospects and customers in a very twenty-first century way.

In its newest Fall release, VanillaSoft has announced a number of new features, most notably the ability to use text messaging (SMS) to communicate as well as the means to track and measure those communications. It’s a way to give the inside sales team a new way to communicate with their customers and prospects, and measure the effectiveness of SMS communication.

“Callers can text the mobile number of a contact (as well as receive replies from the contact), all directly through VanillaSoft,” according to the company. “And the history of each SMS conversation is tracked within a tab on the contact’s page.”

In addition, inside sales personnel can generate automatic text messages from a result code; these codes can trigger a message based on a pre-defined SMS template: a follow-up reply, a thank you message or a call for further action.

While the solution has offered appointment setting capabilities in the past, it now offers text-based appointment reminders. An automated SMS reminder message can be sent to a contact in advance of a scheduled appointment to ensure that activity with the prospect isn’t “lost” or dropped.

“When an appointment is booked by a caller, a reminder email and/or SMS message can automatically be sent to the contact a specified number of minutes, hours or days prior to the scheduled appointment,” according to VanillaSoft.

The Fall release also contains a number of enhancements for credit card payments by supporting several merchant services payment gateways, allowing sales reps to accept credit card payments directly within VanillaSoft. If Authorize.net is your credit card payment gateway, your team can now accept recurring payments (monthly, quarterly, semi-annually or annually) in addition to a one-time payment. In addition, administrators can now control what input fields are visible to sales personnel on the credit card payments tab, and which of those fields are mandatory. This helps to ensure the right information is collected and passed to your credit card processor.

While inside sales will always be a distinct skill that comes with an inherent set of challenges, providing these salespeople with the right tools to do their jobs can ensure they spend more time on selling, and less time fiddling with cumbersome administrative tasks that simply get in the way of the goal.