According to original research by Revenue.io, 77% of reps struggle to find enough time to complete everything they need to during the day. Salesforce research agrees with this, uncovering the bleak fact that reps only spend ⅓ of their time selling.
So what’s taking up reps’ time? Ask the reps themselves, and they list:
- Logging activities
- Dialing numbers manually
- Leaving voicemails
- Prep & planning
- Internal meetings and trainings
When you look at these, you may be surprised to hear that all the most common problems faced by sales reps can be solved by having a high-quality sales dialer. But that’s exactly what it boils down to. After all, when it’s a sales rep’s job to form a connection with people, the tool they use to form those connections has the power to make their day considerably more (or less) productive. Let’s go through these complaints one by one, and break down what they mean for the sort of dialer your sales team needs.
1. Logging activities
When reps log activities manually, such as logging calls and their dispositions, two things happen: first, their workflow is interrupted. Second, the data in your tech stack becomes prone to a lot of errors.
Let’s tackle workflow first. Why does this matter? Well, first of all, because every minute that a rep spends logging a call means another minute that they’re not on the phone, talking to prospects. After all, a seller’s greatest and most valuable ability is to sell things to others – not be a glorified data entry minion.
If that’s not enough to convince you, the American Psychological Association has reported that even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40% in productivity… and every time a rep has to context switch out of their dialer and into Salesforce, that’s a mental block. So those minutes logging calls add up in more ways than you would expect.
The second issue is simpler. The more that the data in your systems relies on human inputs, the more errors and gaps you’ll have in your data. These gaps and errors can add up by making it harder to gain actionable insights, and in worst-case scenarios can throw off your revenue forecasting so that your business model is built on incorrect numbers.
Thankfully, the solution to both these problems is simple: getting a dialer that automatically logs all activities. That way your reps are freed from logging the activities themselves, and your records will be cleaner as a result. Everybody wins.
2. Dialing numbers manually
Now this is a tricky one, because if you go for a dialer that auto-dials numbers, you could be placing yourself in hot water from a compliance standpoint. While you shouldn’t take this blog post as direct legal advice (talk to your lawyer for that!), you should be aware that the TCPA forbids many types of auto-dialing, so you can’t necessarily get rid of the need to dial numbers altogether.
But you can help your reps to be more efficient by taking advantage of other features that speed up the dialing process, such as click-to-dial and DialNext capabilities that significantly increase the number of calls a rep can make without falling afoul of call regulations. If your reps are still manually dialing numbers themselves, then it’s definitely worth looking into ways to improve their call efficiency. In fact, Freshbooks went from having their reps make 30-40 outbound calls per day to 90-100 calls per day thanks to Revenue.io’s dialer. So it can definitely be done!
3. Leaving voicemails
Are your reps leaving voicemails when a prospect doesn’t pick up the phone? First of all, they should! And ideally, the voicemails should be customized to where the prospect is in your sales funnel, or reference the rep’s previous contact with them. But many sales teams don’t follow this best practice because leaving voicemails is understandably a tedious and time-consuming activity.
But let’s put ourselves in the shoes of that prospect for a minute. If you haven’t spoken to a rep from this company before, or if you’ve only spoken to them a couple of times, the odds are good that you won’t recognize their phone number. And so the unanswered call will join a long list of other missed calls on your phone, lost amongst all the robo-call and spam calls that you have no interest in returning. The rep may as well not have called you at all.
Yet this scenario changes when the rep leaves a voicemail. Suddenly, there’s a much higher chance of their message getting through because people have far more missed calls than voicemails every day. You’re much more likely to check your voicemail, and whether you respond or not, the rep’s company will now be top of mind.
Thankfully, sales teams can reap the benefits of voicemails without sacrificing their productivity with a dialer feature like Voicemail Drop, a Revenue.io tool that allows reps to pre-record voicemails and leave a voicemail at the touch of a button. They can even record multiple types of voicemails and save them in a library, so that prospects get a relevant message each time.
4. Prep & planning
Before a rep even picks up the phone, they should know some basic info about the person they’re calling: their name, title, company, and any previous interactions with marketing campaigns or the website are a good start. (Of course, if the rep is at the point where they’re doing a discovery call, they should know a lot more.)
This research takes time, but it’s non-negotiable if your reps want to have good calls. So the issue becomes: how can you streamline this research so that it takes as little time as possible?
A good dialer will provide this contextual info on-demand, within the dialer interface itself. At Revenue.io, our RingDNA dialer pulls all the information that a rep needs from within Salesforce, and presents it when a rep clicks on a contact. This cuts down significantly on the time reps need to spend prepping and planning for calls, without compromising their readiness to have high-value conversations.
5. Internal meetings and trainings
Reps spend a lot of time in internal meetings and trainings, where they’re often being told the same things over and over again. This is for a good reason: for new information to sink in, sales managers and coaches understand the value of repetition if they want to avoid the pitfalls of the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. This principle states that without repetition, most new information is forgotten within a month. Research by Gartner bears this out, with B2B sales reps forgetting 70% of the information they learn within a week of training, and 87% will forget it within a month.
That’s why there’s so much repetition in a rep’s day, but the issue is that it cuts into selling time. The solution to this is to embed the repetition of important facts and trainings into a rep’s calls, so that they’re reminded of important information and best practices at the exact moment that it’s useful to them.
This is why we highly recommend Moments
by Revenue.io, the only technology of its kind to embed these critical moments of repetition in the rep’s dialer itself. Notifications are triggered based off keywords and behaviors, and help reps to have better call outcomes while significantly cutting down on the need for repetitive trainings.
And there you have it! The five most important things that B2B teams need in 2024. For more ideas about how having the right technology can propel your sales team to success, check out The New Sales Stack.