Sales Productivity w/Manual Dialers vs. Parallel/Agent Assisted Dialers

In the past week, I’ve received dozens of inquiries from colleagues, prospective clients, and investors considering making an investment in “Sales Acceleration Technology” such as InsideSales.com or ConnectAndSell.  They ask – “why are you still showing up as a reference customer for InsideSales.com if you work for their biggest competitor – ConnectAndSell?

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ANSWER: I will stand by the fact that the InsideSales.com platform helped me to put in a process lead follow-up that increased call volumes by 2X.  To net out the improvement, when I took over the team at ON24, call volume for a Lead Gen Rep was 30 calls/day (unacceptable).  Over the course of a few quarters, by removing non-selling activities, the Lead Gen group improved call volume to 60+ calls/day.  What the quote below doesn’t show – it takes 22 dials to have a single b2b conversation.  So, these 60 – 100 dials/day were only producing 3 – 5 conversations! 

The PowerDialer has dramatically improved leverage for our team. We’ve increased call volume and connect rates by more than 2X. Our lead gen group has driven more meetings than ever before.”
Chad Burmeister, Director of Corporate Sales, ON24

“At ConnectAndSell, my sales team of 9 Account Executives in Denver, CO made 18,000 dials in just 3.5 business days and nearly 100,000 dials in December 2014!  This is compared to 18,000 in all of Q3 by the entire sales staff at my last company!” Chad Burmeister, VP of Sales & Marketing

ImageThe Bottom Line: Increasing calls/day from 30 to 60 or 100/day is “ok“, but can it really move the needle in Pipeline and Bookings? ANSWER: Probably not!  At least it didn’t for my last company.  As Josiane Feigon said on February 6th in San Francisco at the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals Regional Event, “a Sales Superhero should be having upwards of 25+ conversations/day.”  http://www.tele-smart.com/blog/aa-isp-san-francisco/  In fact, in her video, Josiane showed an example of a Sales Professional doing just that–using ConnectAndSell.  Dave Elkington, President and Co-Founder of InsideSales.com at the same event said, “ConnectAndSell drives sales acceleration and compresses sales cycles.”  I couldn’t have said it better myself!

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So what? If you are considering an investment in Sales Acceleration Technology, I’d encourage you to run a pilot test comparing the two options.  Success criteria should be simple and focused on the outcomes you are looking for – which technology/solution delivers more conversations and more pipeline/bookings?  Visit connectandsell.com to learn more!