9 Ways A Dialer Can Improve Your Sales Team’s Performance

Your sales team’s performance could always be better—even if everyone is a star sales rep. Would it benefit your sales team to make more calls and have more quality conversations with prospects? This is what everyone is searching for, but how can a dialer help you achieve it and improve your sales team’s performance?

What is a dialer?

A dialer is a piece of software that sales teams can use to dial numbers more quickly and help your team streamline your cold calling efforts. One of the most popular types is a power dialer, which automatically dials numbers in rapid succession to save your team time between each call.

Dialers of all kinds are most commonly used in call centers and in sales, allowing people to make calls without having to physically dial out the numbers on a keypad.

In recent times, dialers have become much more sophisticated than that, though. They can also be linked to a CRM, meaning the dialer has quick access to information on the person they’re calling, plus this lets sales reps take notes on the fly and complete many other helpful functions.

For sales teams, this is vitally important. Sales calls are partly about volume. The more calls you make, the more likely you are to start conversations with prospects and generate leads.

If each salesperson is spending 20 seconds dialing a number between each call, then this adds up to a huge amount of inefficiency. It might seem like a simple thing, but a dialer can have a significant impact on a sales team’s performance.

9 ways a dialer can make your team more effective

As we mentioned earlier, modern dialers have a lot more capabilities than simply dialing a number. Their ability to integrate with other software means they don’t just allow salespeople to get through more calls, but also make better calls.

When your team makes a higher volume of calls, and each of those calls is more focused and efficient, you’re going to become much more productive.

1. No dialing—more calls in less time

The point of sales outreach is starting conversations with people and talking to leads. Every second your salesperson spends dialing numbers is another second they’re not talking to potential customers.

It’s a simple equation: the less time you spend dialing, the more calls you’re going to make, and this leads to more opportunities for your sales team.

Sure, it might only take a few seconds to dial a number, but when you’re doing outreach at scale, then it can add up to a massive amount of time savings each day.

If you have 10 salespeople making 100 calls a day and they each spend 10 seconds dialing each number, then that’s well over two hours a day spent dialing. Add those numbers up over an entire year, and you’re looking at a huge amount of potential lost time.

Sales is more complicated than simply saying the more people you talk to, the more sales you’re going to make, but volume does make a difference, and a power dialer is a quick way to reach more people in less time. As long as you’re calling the right people—your best fit customers—the faster you can make your dials, the better.

2. Dial through a list—spend less time between calls

It’s not just the act of dialing that consumes your salespeople’s time. There’s a whole process that takes place between calls, and if it’s not optimized, then you could be losing precious time.

One of the places where time is lost is when salespeople have to search for the next number to dial. In most sales outreach, this isn’t necessary. You should have a list of targeted numbers validated using a phone validator, allowing your salesperson to put down the phone and immediately call the next person on the list without worrying about incorrect or outdated numbers.

Dialers can make this process completely automatic. Rather than the salesperson having to think about who they call next and then dial the number, a dialer can start dialing as soon as the salesperson has put the phone down on the last call.

Again, this might only save a few seconds, but when it happens thousands of times, it can add up to a huge amount of time saved.

3. Instantly access prospect profiles—make more personalized calls

The focus so far has been on cold calling speed. Yes, making more calls is a good thing, but that won’t make much difference if those calls are low-quality. You want to empower your salespeople to make more calls, but they also need the tools to make sure they can start beneficial conversations.

A big part of this is access to information.

Each prospect is different. The more research your team has done and the more information you have stored on them, the more personalized you can make the call, and the more likely it is that you’ll have an in-depth conversation.

Dialers facilitate this by linking to your CRM. For example, a dialer might integrate natively with Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, or other solutions. This allows your salespeople to get instant access to prospect profiles and take notes throughout the conversation. It’s a little cliche, but information is power—your salespeople can make lots of calls, but if they don’t have access to the right information, then they’re not going to make as many conversions.

4. Local presence—connect on more calls

How often do phone calls from unrecognized numbers get picked up?

Around 80% of calls go to voicemail, which means the majority of times, your team is going to fail to have a live conversation with the prospect. That’s a huge number—for every thousand calls, 800 go to voicemail.

When you’re making lots of calls, bringing the percentage that goes to voicemail down, even by a small amount, can make a big difference.

One of the ways dialers can help you do this is through local presence. Instead of using a random area code, this allows you to show a number that’s local to the recipient when you make calls. It’s unsurprisingly proven to make people more likely to accept your call.

People are naturally more likely to pick up a call from a local number. If we take our example of your team making 1,000 calls and reaching voicemail 800 times, then this could flip those numbers and mean you only reach voicemail 200 times.

More high-quality conversations will result in more customers, but you’ve got to connect first.

5. Multi-device—work on the go

Work, and by extension, sales, have become a lot more flexible. Technology has meant sales teams don’t have to be tied to the office in the same way they used to be. Now, salespeople have access to all the information and tools they need, no matter where they are in the world. They can truly make their dials from anywhere.

A dialer plays into this way of working with a multi-device approach. It means your salespeople can easily transfer calls across devices while still retaining a high level of efficiency. Whether it’s a desktop, laptop, or mobile device, your sales reps have access to all the tools they would in the office.

This makes your entire sales team more flexible, giving you more options over how you run your operations.

6. Omnichannel—reach people in different ways

Just as people can now work on different devices from virtually any location, customers now interact with brands in different ways across different devices and channels.

Often, there’s no one best way to reach a prospect, but it’s a combination of touchpoints that grabs their attention. Some people are easier to reach by phone, some on LinkedIn or other social channels, and others via their email inbox.

Modern marketing is increasingly omnichannel and a good sales dialer will fit in with this approach. Many dialers integrate with other marketing platforms to maximize your reach. For example, you can integrate a sales call into cold email sequences, or even use direct mail as part of your strategy. Here’s what the sequence might look like:

• Send a cold email
• The prospect clicks a link and fills out a contact form
• You call the prospect
• They go into an email sequence for hot prospects
• You invite them to an informational webinar you host or live stream
• You connect with them on LinkedIn
• You send out a direct mail gift
• You make a follow-up call

This approach connects the physical and digital world, but it’s not easy to coordinate when you’re doing it at scale. The right dialer software can facilitate omnichannel sequences, greatly boosting your chances of engaging the prospect. The best tools let you add emails, phone calls, and social media tasks to your sales sequences.

7. Voicemail drop—waste less time

If 80% of calls go to voicemail and your sales reps spend 30 seconds leaving a message each time, then you’re losing a ton of time. They listen to the prerecorded message, wait for the beep, leave their message (hopefully getting it right the first time), and by the time they’ve done all this, they’ve lost valuable time.

When you have a focused dialing list, then the majority of the voicemails you’re going to use will be identical, so there’s no need to keep recording new messages. Instead, you can use what’s known as voicemail drop, which allows you to pre-record voice messages and drop them in the recipient's voicemail.

As soon as the person doesn’t pick up, you can drop the message, and get on with calling the next person on the list. This is a huge time saver for your sales team.

8. Call recording—improve training

Sales outreach is partly about volume, but it’s also about skill. It takes time to develop these sales skills, both for individual salespeople and businesses as a whole.

One of the best ways to improve is to learn from your past performance. This makes call recording a great tool for any sales team.

Call recording allows salespeople to revisit sales calls and analyze what they did well and where they can improve. It also provides excellent training materials, allowing new employees to learn from experienced sales pros.

Call recording can be extremely useful for improving the performance of your team. It helps managers understand what makes the best sales reps so successful, and incorporate this into onboarding and training. It’s a total game-changer when it comes to effective cold calling.

9. Analytics—get instant insights

Tracking what’s happening during cold calls is key to actually improving your team’s cold calling performance. Collecting analytics and using them to improve your sales calls is a crucial action for your sales team.

There’s a lot of data you can collect during sales outreach:

• How long does your team spend on each call?
• How long do they spend between each call?
• What’s an ideal length of call?
• What’s the best day to make a call?
• What’s the best time to make a call?

These are all questions that can help you improve your performance, and they are questions sales dialer can help you answer.

The more data you have at your fingertips, the easier it is to optimize your sales process, and ultimately, convert more leads. With these insights, managers can adjust strategies and make recommendations throughout the day, implementing small changes that can make a big difference to performance.

Analytics drive performance improvements, and with the right software, you will have access to more timely insights.

Final thoughts

A sales dialer isn’t just about making more calls. It’s about giving you the tools you need to make more high-quality calls, and when you do this, it is going to show in your results.

There’s no need for your sales team to waste time manually dialing numbers and looking through contacts to find the next person to call. While this might only take a few seconds, the process is repeated thousands of times, which means it adds up to a serious amount of inefficiency.

Sales dialers can immediately eliminate these inefficiencies, but with other features like smart integrations, omnichannel sequences, call recording, and analytics, they also improve the quality of your calls.

With so many benefits, they’re a must-have tool for sales outreach.

About the guest contributor:

Sam Molony is part of the marketing team at Mailshake. Sam’s goal is to inspire people to not just “hang in there” but to thrive. When Sam's not publishing or promoting new content you can find him playing sports and cooking up a storm in the kitchen.