The web has disrupted everything we know about sales and marketing. Even the time-honored practice of cold-calling has fallen by the wayside, and face-to-face selling, advertising, yellow pages, and direct mail are limping along. But in return, the Internet is opening up the greatest opportunities ever available for sales organizations who learn it’s secrets.
InsideSales.com was originally founded to generate cost effective leads through outbound cold-calling technology. We were the first web-based sales tracking Lead Management CRM system with fully integrated dialers and voice messaging tools … and though far ahead of the competition, we were obsolete before we launched.
Why? Because we thought we were building the ultimate system for cold-calling, and cold calling had already become obsolete, we just didn’t know it.
At the end of 2004 my partner Dave Elkington and I had developed nearly two dozen telephony ‘Power Tools’ like automatic dialers that we embedded within online CRM solutions and we were getting crazy productivity increases helping our clients with cold calling. Our sales were picking up and things were going well. So much so, that we decided to pull together a test to see just what we really could do.
We had already built a sales team of ‘closers’ that worked […]
3 Lead Generation Strategies – When to Call… When Not to Call
24 September 2009 — Ken Krogue
0 Comments
Gerhard Gschwandtner – Founder of Selling Power Magazine
A friend of mine, Gerhard Gschwandtner, the founder and owner of Selling Power Magazine, just took some time and wrote a post on his blog about when is the best time to call back on leads.
The post he wrote came from our landmark research study conducted with Dr. James Oldroyd of MIT that was originally presented in October of 2007 at the MarketingSherpa B2B Demand Summit 2007 in both Boston and San Francisco. This study was the genesis for the new industry called Lead Response Management; a subset of Lead Management that focuses on responding immediately, continually, consistently, and optimally to increase contact and qualification rates of web-based leads. The interesting information involves the incredible changes in your ability to reach people by calling on the best day of the week, time of the day and most importantly, calling back immediately; as in 5 minutes!
BEST DAY OF WEEK TO CALL
To quickly summarize Dr. Oldroyds research: Tuesday is the worst day to call, while Thursday is best. In fact, if you call on Thursday you have a 49.7 percent higher chance […]
Did you know I hate telemarketing? What? One of the two founders of InsideSales.com admits he hates telemarketing?
I don’t think there is anything worse than a call at dinner time; or worse yet, on a Sunday morning, from a telemarketer.
I just wrote a post on The Insider | The Official Blog Of InsideSales.com called “Why do we Hate Predictive Dialers (And Love Power Dialers)” and admitted that I can’t stand telemarketing.
Dave Elkington, my partner, and I decided a long time ago that we wanted to hang with professional sales people, not telemarketers. And to us inside sales means remote selling.
Here are my 10 reasons Why I Hate Telemarketing:
I have to say “No!” seven times before they hang up.
They never pronounce my name right (of course, few do.)
They sell stuff that sounds good until I read the fine print.
They are betting I will procrastinate cancelling my free trial and keep paying.
They don’t think I can think.
I always hear a click and a pause, and I know it is a telemarketer using a predictive dialer.
Politicians exempted themselves from all the laws about telemarketing at dinner time.
Non-profits call and burn their good name with me becuase they are too pushy.
They play my wife […]
Remote Sales needs leads. Good Leads. Leads that will become customers. This kind of lead is not easy to find, though there are some companies that would tell you otherwise.
These companies make their profits by selling what they want you to believe are leads. In reality they are often little more than a long list of contact information. Anybody with a phone book could gather a lead just as useful (or useless!).
What separates lists from leads is qualification. Leads are qualified by four factors, and to be good leads they need at least 2 or three of these factors. The four factors are:
Need
Urgency
Decision Making Capability
Money
While there are some companies that sell leads that are more pre-qualified than those next to useless lists – there may be no better source for leads that meet the four qualifying factors than your own corporate website.
Visitors to your site are already showing a sign of interest – and many of them came to your site looking for a solution to a need. Visitors who use the internet expect immediate results – reflecting urgency. Already two of the four qualifiers […]
Last week I wrote about what you can do to get the most out of your Auto Dialer. Look forward to me highlighting in the future different kinds of dialers, and what you can expect from them. This week .
What’s the best kind of Dialer for you? Part 1
Several varieties of dialers exist. Click-to-call, auto dialers, ratio, and predictive dialers have each been available and used by remote sales businesses for decades. These dialers were developed by companies who wanted to be able to churn through thousands of leads a day while identifying the easiest sales. Over time advancements in dialer technology has led to a more refined and customer focused alternative. This alternative is the power dialer.
Power dialers still meet the fundamental goal of all dialers – they help sales representatives call more leads each day. An average rep can call two or three times the amount of leads in a day using a power dialer than he could call dialing manually. While this number is lower than with some other kinds of dialers, its impressive enough to justify the investment in such software.
Power dialers go beyond increasing […]
Auto Dialers are staples in the industry. What other software solutions allow you to get the most out of your Auto Dialer?
Top enhancements for August include timers and warnings and duping, oh my.
Timers used to track employee login and dialer usage time now stop even if the user forgets to stop them when they log out. This enhancement increases the accuracy our timers used to calculate efficiencies in dialing and total hours worked or not worked.
We added a warning in the dialer to save lead. Often times when calling the last lead using the dialer, a user will log out of the dialer or close the browser without saving the changes to the lead. Now we give the user a friendly reminder to save before exiting thus preventing an accidental loss of data and a frantic call to the supervisor.
We also created a time frame option on Duplicate Check. Now when using the duplicate check while posting a lead you can specify the age in which a lead will be marked as a duplicate. For instance, if a leads comes in that has a match but the match is older than dirt, the system will allow the new lead in without marking the new lead as a duplicate.
There are email, print, and export options for all billing transactions in the Manage […]
