TMCnews Featured Article

The lifeblood of any sales organization is leads: without them, sales dry up quickly and bottom lines fall. How companies get leads is usually a secret sauce for every organization in question. Social media is in its nascent stages in sales organizations, but many companies are finding increasing success with a more old-fashioned method: outbound telemarketing. Many sales organizations call the process “automated lead nurturing.”

It’s a way of speeding up the lead generation process. Marketo’s (News - Alert) Shonal Narayan recently wrote for Business2Community and recounted how his organization has placed more emphasis on the rate at which leads flow through the funnel and developed ways to accelerate the rate aka shorten the buying cycle.

Outbound telemarketing can help build both immediacy and relevance, two factors important in driving sales leads through the process faster, speeding up the activity through the sales pipeline. Speed is certainly of the essence, and using outbound dialing technology can multiply many times over the number of contacts a sales person can make during the day.

“Sales reps are expensive, which means that their time needs be spent focused on closing deals. But they won’t be able to close deals if they can’t connect with the leads,” wrote Narayan.

The automated nature of outbound telemarketing can also help. Many sales organizations set minimum standards, goals and service levels, only to find that sales personnel are getting distracted by other tasks and simply not picking up the phone often enough. With automated sales management solutions and outbound dialers, sales managers can ensure that sales personnel are hitting all their goals of making a maximum number of contacts each day.

Using a pre-loaded list of numbers, a predictive dialer will automatically place outbound calls, connecting that call to a sales person when a prospect picks up. The dialer solution can monitor the call volume and time per call, intelligently adjusting its dial rate to minimize the time sales personnel spend waiting between conversations. This eliminates the “down time” and distractions that come with manual dialing.

In the end, sales personnel can make more contacts, speak to more prospects and generate more leads in less time than without automated solutions. Sales organizations can better hit their targets, ensuring that their leads flow faster and their sales pipelines stay full.