Fatal Flaw #2 Poor Dialing Practices

The second flaw is poor dialing practices. Poor dialing practices include: manually dialing, using the wrong type of automated dialer, calling through static dialing lists, lack of call reporting, lack of a response strategy, calling activities are not synced with other marketing activities and voice messages are seen as time wasters and are not left when the opportunity presents itself.

One of our clients was of the mindset that they didn’t have a need for automating any of their dialing activities. They simply didn’t get enough leads to justify high-volume calling. We challenged them to reducing their prospecting to a few time blocks throughout the day, employ a power dialer and let us know the results. The day that we asked for the results their best rep had only been on the phone for 35 minutes, he had placed 30 dials through the power dialer, contacted 6 decision makers and set up 2 appointments. They also said it wasn’t uncommon for their reps to make up to 100 calls in two to three hours of dialing; they had a hard time doing that in a full day before. Making your sales reps more efficient is not a negative. You may free up some of their time that can be used for building prospecting lists, contributing to marketing material, sharpening the saw or you can handle the same volume of leads with fewer reps on staff.

Another client called us as a last ditch effort. He was a week away from shutting down his business. He would send leads to reps working out of their homes and manually dialing. His only report was the number of leads that converted into sales. He had no idea if he was giving his reps too few leads or too many; the only thing he did know was that he wasn’t making enough money to stay in business. Within days of using a power dialer to call through leads he was able to pinpoint the problem. His sales reps were skimming the cream from the top and neglecting all other leads. This practice was driving his business into the grave. He decided to utilize a voice broadcast dialer to call all of the leads, generate interest and allow the prospect to connect with a sales rep. This forced the sales reps to talk with everyone that was remotely interested. Within the following month, the owner increased his number of sales reps from 12 to over 50 and was catapulting out of the hole he had found himself.

What can automated dialing do for you?
· Reporting
· Lead prioritization
· Rep accountability
· Increase productivity

As you start to look at automated dialers be aware that there are several types of dialers and you need to find the right type or it will do more harm then good. For example; someone calling businesses should not use a multi-line dialer, such as a predictive or a ratio dialer, due to the problem of delayed connection and abandonment issues. A qualified B2B lead is far too expensive to have a receptionist hang up after she says hello a couple of times.

Things to address when looking for a dialer:
· Hosted vs. premise
· Dynamic vs. static lists
· Responsive vs. non-responsive calling
· Single vs. multiple lines

As a summary, it doesn’t matter if you are calling a small list of referrals or a large database of leads, automating your dialing can have a tremendous impact on your productivity. Utilizing a hosted solution greatly reduces the cost to get started with a dialer and a power or preview dialer is a perfect fit for calling business to business. We have seen several companies double, if not triple, revenues, reduce employee turnover and reduce the expense of wasted leads by using the proper dialer.