Serial Dialers vs. Parallel Dialers

If you are in technology sales and you haven’t implemented a “dialer” application for your company, you should strongly consider one.  Over the past 3 years, by leveraging a Power Dialer (+ Gamification, + Marketing Automation, + Social123.com), we’ve seen Lead Gen Productivity increase by over 500%!  And measurable pipeline grow to over $10M/quarter by following up on marketing leads in a timely and frequent manner.

What is a “dialer”?  A dialer is a SaaS application that plugs into your CRM to enable your sales (and Lead Gen, Inside Sales) professionals to make more calls in a day/week/month and therefore, drive more pipeline and ultimately more sales.

Our results with a Serial Dialer last quarter: 40 Sales Professionals using the dialer including 6 Lead Gen, and 34 Account Executives drove 21,000 outbound calls, had conversations with more than 2,750 people using the dialer, and generated more than $10M in net new pipeline for the business.

Pros: 21,000 dials, 13.1% contact rate, not bad at all.  Far better than prior quarters where there was no measurement, and

Cons: On the surface, 21,000 dials sounds great.  When you peel back the onion, 14,000 were dial attempt #1, 3,500 dial attempt #2, and the remaining 3,500 spread across dial attempts 3 – 7.  So what?  The contact rate of dial attempt #1, and #2, and #3, and # 4, and # 5, and # 6, and #7 is roughly the EXACT same on dial attempt #1 vs. attempt #7!  Because you never know when someone is going to pick up the phone.  (Maybe you catch someone between meetings, or they are just back from vacation).

What is a “Parallel Dialer?”  A Parallel dialer also plugs into a CRM application, however the difference is that rather than making one call after another (serial), it can dial multiple numbers in parallel.  By enabling a Sales Professional to dial 8 – 10X the number of calls than when dialing serially, results are significant.

Our results with a Parallel Dialer in TWO WEEKS: 2 Lead Gen Representatives, 1 Director of Corporate Sales using the dialer application 1 hour/day drove over 6,000 dials in 10 business days.  So what?  Extrapolate this out to an entire sales team over a full quarter, and realistically, you can make a team of 40 sales professionals behave like a team of 400 sales professionals!

Results… extrapolated:

  • 3 Reps x 10 hours/rep x 10 business days = 30 hours, 6,000 dials
  • 40 Reps x 10 hours/rep x 10 business days = 80,000+ dials
  • 40 Reps using a Parallel Dialer just 1 hour/day for an entire quarter = 480,000+ dials

Pros: RESULTS.  Serial Dialer = 21,000.  Parallel Dialer = 480,000.  22X more calls.  Assumed – 22X more pipeline?

Cons: NONE SO FAR.  At first reps are a little shy when it comes to making so many connections in an hour.  They aren’t used to it.  After running a day or two, if/when you take it away from them… look out.

Consider: A typical F1000 company might have 1000 different contacts who could buy your product or service.  IF the best practice is to dial each contact to try to reach them 7 times, then # of dials required = 7 x Number of Contacts you want to call.  Example: FedEx has 929 contacts with “Marketing” in their title when running an advanced search with LinkedIn.  Using a Parallel Dialer, a Rep would have to make 30 calls/day for 116 days to make 7 dial attempts to these 929 contacts.  Using a Parallel Dialer for just 2 hours/day, this rep could get through the list in just 9 days!

So what’s next?  I can’t wait for a day when you can combine the best of both of these applications!  Traditional Serial dialer capabilities like lead routing and local area code dialing, with Parallel Dialing.  What would happen to your sales organization if you were 22X more productive?

Check back at the end of Q4 because I expect to be able to shed more light on the subject by then!  I’m piloting these tools now, and expect to report great things in 90 days!

Good selling…