Companies looking to significantly increase their sales should deploy an outbound lead generation team, according to Aaron Ross, author of “Predictable Revenue”. “Your prospectors should not close…Your prospectors should prospect.”. A focused prospect team not only is more focused, but also more efficient. Here we look at how to utilize modern software to make your outbound lead generation extremely efficient.
Automated and personalized email
While automated email can be a great tool to respond to customer inquiries, the assumption is that you have leads coming to your website or call your sales number. Many companies purchase customer lists and use mass emailing software to make the initial contact. These software can track email open, and more important, track web site visits when prospects clicked the links in your email.
Automated and personalized text message
In addition to emailing, text message is getting more and more popular, especially in younger generations. The advantage is that it will be delivered and there is no SPAM folder for text message. But it does cost a lot more than emailing.
More efficient calling
There are various dialers you can use to make your outbound telemarketing team more efficient. These dialers include auto dialer, predictive dialer, progressive dialer, preview dialer, and click-to-call.
Auto dialer
Use an auto dialer is the most efficient way to deliver your audio message to an large audience. It can play your audio message to live answer or leave your message on answering machines. Once set, it requires no human intervention. If you utilize press-1 campaigns, your agents only need talk to people who are interested. Normally, the phone line to agent ratio is more that 10 to 1.
However, you must be aware of the Federal and State auto dialing laws. Most of these rules apply to telemarketers calling consumers and even more rules when calling cell phones. Nowadays, using an auto dialer for lead generation purpose is severely limited. The good news is that you have other tools at your disposal.
A predictive dialer automatically makes outbound calls and only connect live answer to your agents. The main purpose for a predictive dialer is to skip all the answering machines (the system can automatically leave a message optionally). Normally, the phone line to agent ration is 2 to 1 or 3 to 1.
One thing to check is the “dropped call”. This happens when a call is answered by a live human, the system cannot find an agent to connect the call to because all agents are all busy. To the prospect, he says hello, and hear only silence and the call is then dropped. For Voicent system, the system can handle dropped calls much better. The call can be forwarded to an rollover IVR system, where the system can play some automatic message and interact with the prospect automatically.
Even though in most cases, your prospect does know whether the call is placed by a dialer or a human, many laws still consider it as an automatic dialer. So check with your local attorneys for details.
A progressive dialer automatically dials from a call list. The agent needs to be involved in the whole process, including listening to the whole answering machine message. A progress dialer only dials out on a single line.
A preview dialer is like a progressive dialer, but it gives an agent some fixed time to decide whether to make or skip the call. For Voicent software, the list is managed by the built-in CRM.
Voicemail drop. A productivity feature for both progressive dialer and preview dialer is voice mail drop. It works as follows: when a call is answered by a voice mail system, the agent navigate the phone system, and simply click a button to have the system automatically leave a voice mail message. While the system is still playing your message to the voice mail system, it starts another phone call automatically.
The least automated dialing is click to call. This is still so much better than entering the phone number manually.
