How Dialers Increase Productivity In Salesforce

In sales, time is quite literally money. Every minute saved gives a sales team the opportunity to make more calls, prospect more leads, and bring in more revenue. In addition to using Salesforce to increase productivity, adding a dialer is another way for any sales team that uses a phone to increase productivity even more.

Before we dig in on how, let’s start with the basics:

What Is A Salesforce Phone Dialer?

In the simplest terms, a phone dialer (also known as a CTI or telephony integration) is a way to directly link your phone activity to and make calls within Salesforce.

Not all phone dialers are made the same though, so here are some features to look for when picking the best tool to increase your productivity:

CLICK-TO-DIAL

A Salesforce phone dialer enables you to stop spending time manually dialing phone numbers. Instead, you can look up the desired contact and simply click the phone number to dial. It’s a small fix that has a big impact. For example, let’s say it takes 12 seconds to dial a phone number and that one salesperson makes 1000 calls per month. That means this one sales person is saving more than 3 hours per month or 40 hours in a year.

By using click-to-dial, you can save as much time in a year as you work in a single week. Crazy how those 12 seconds can add up, huh?

PHONE ACTIVITY TRACKING

In the same way that Salesforce automatically logs and tracks all of your email communication with a client, adding a phone dialer enables you to also track all of your sales calls. Can you imagine not having to manually enter your phone calls into Salesforce and being able to add notes on the account while you are still on the phone? This is what happens for 100% of your calls. No missed entries and no data lost. That is the power of a phone dialer. It can save you hours of admin work a day, and less admin work means more selling time.

DIAL BY LIST

To shave even more time off your calls, a Dial By List features allows you to create custom lead lists in Salesforce based on which clients you are targeting that day. Building lists is as easy as scanning your list of records and checking boxes. Once your list is complete and you start dialing, all of the client information for the account you are dialing appears on screen. After finishing that call, the next call and its account info appears on screen, and so on. Some dialer systems, such as Fastcall, even allow you to automate your outboard communication in this way with SMS texting. More on that below. This kind of functionality is another great way to shave seconds off of every outbound call by minimizing the time spent searching for records and wondering which client to call next.

INBOUND CALL SCREENS

In the same way that customer information pops up for each outbound call when using the Dial By List feature of a phone dialer, account information will also automatically pop up on your screen when you receive an inbound call from an account in Salesforce. This enables you to greet a customer by name and instantly get downloaded on the account history, without you having to ask the customer for details. This means quicker phone calls and more satisfied customers, both of which can result in more sales.

VOICEMAIL DROP

Instead of leaving a live recorded voicemail every time you don’t reach a customer, Voicemail Drop allows you to leave a pre-recorded message for a client with the click of a button. You can also record several different options, so you can choose which one to leave based on variables such as language, offers, industries, etc.

Let’s go back to our previously estimated 1000 calls per month for a moment. Let’s conservatively say 25% of customers didn’t pick up and you got their voicemail. That means that you left 250 voicemails that month. If each voicemail is one minute long, that means you are spending 4 hours a month and 50 hours a year simply leaving voicemails for clients.

Voicemail Drop can literally save you more time than you would spend in one full week of working.

LOCAL PRESENCE

When a dialer has a Local Presence feature, it will showcase a phone number with a local area code on a customer’s caller ID. According to Salesforce, using a local number results in people being 400% more likely to answer a call. So in addition to increasing productivity by saving you time, dialers can also increase your productivity by increasing the chances of a customer picking up. More customer connections equal more opportunity to sell and fewer games of phone tag.

OMNI-CHANNEL SUPPORT

When working in Salesforce, using a phone dialer with Omni-Channel Support functionality means that you won’t get sent a call when you are not ready for one. Whether you are busy on another call, answering emails, online chatting, or taking call notes, a phone dialer can recognize when you are occupied and route the calls to another sales rep. This means less missed calls, happier employees and customers, and more accurate reports of how a sales team is spending their time – all of which leads to more productivity.

SIMULRING

In this day and age, business is not only conducted at a desk. Sales can be made in the car, on the train, and while running to the next meeting. A phone dialer with simulring capabilities can be programmed to have the same phone call ring across multiple phones, including landlines, mobile phones, office/desk phones, or softphones. That way no matter where you are, you can get your business done. In addition, simulring also enables you to have the same phone call ring across multiple sales people to prevent missed inbound calls. Less missed calls equals more productivity.

CALL RECORDING

A dialer can also enable phone call recording and real-time monitoring functionality, empowering managers to help with coaching and training. What better way to increase productivity than to onboard, coach, and train employees easily and efficiently? This can vastly improve call quality and customer satisfaction, which results in less talk time per call and more sales.

REPORTING

In addition to call recording, a phone dialer enables managers to have robust call data reporting at their fingertips. Managers can determine best practices from top sellers to roll out to the rest of the team, coach when team members are over or under KPIs, get a sense of how many calls it takes to make a sale, and a host of other insights that can increase sales productivity.

SMS CAPABILITIES

Phone, email, and in-person meetings are no longer the only way to conduct business. If you’re not looking at ways to include SMS texting in your business communication, you could be missing out on a lucrative platform/channel. According to eWeek, 80% of people are currently using texting for business. So when looking to incorporate a dialer, make sure that your dialer also supports SMS communication and has features like SMS templates, SMS-By-List, SMS message automation, and SMS messaging reporting.

Phone Automation

Another way to increase your productivity with a phone dialer is to layer on a third party Salesforce app called Callme. Callme allows for you to immediately and automatically call back leads who have just filled out a Salesforce web-to-lead form. This enables you to most likely be the first to reach these potential customers and to connect when they are still in a buyer’s mindset. Research from the Harvard Business Review shows that when leads are contacted within one hour from receiving an inquiry, companies are nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead compared to contacting the lead within two hours. When compared to waiting 24 hours or more, companies are more than 60 times likely to qualify the lead when calling back within an hour.

Callme’s phone automation capabilities are compatible with any phone dialer. However, Callme has announced that it will soon allow customers who use Fastcall as its phone dialer to also publish real-time callback/hold time estimates to their websites. Fastcall is Callme’s parent company.

Callme is currently the only Salesforce app that adds phone call automation and callback estimates to Salesforce web-to-lead forms.

When considering a phone dialer, all of the features listed above are available on Fastcall – the #1 native Salesforce phone & SMS system – and its newest Salesforce app, Callme.

If you are a Salesforce user and you’d like to see how Fastcall can increase your productivity, you can take advantage of our 7 day free trial on the Salesforce AppExchange. If you have any questions, we’d love to talk to you. Just email us at sales@fastcall.com.