Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Predictive Versus Power: Which Dialer Is The Best?

By Theo Souza

Predictive dialers are often still lauded as the ?best way to perform telesales.? All of the hype about the effectiveness of a predictive dialer is largely created by the manufacturers of these sales tools. Research, as well as experience, shows that a Power dialer is a much more reliable dialer solution. This is especially true of business to business sales.

The predictive dialer?s main weakness is the large volume of lost leads it generates. If a company is spending time and money on generating leads they will want to retain as many of them as possible. The way a predictive dialer works makes this goal impossible.

Dialers are supposed to allow sales reps to dial a large volume of leads, but predictive dialers accomplish this by calling more leads than there are available sales representatives. When a call the dialer makes is answered there is a chance that there will be no sales reps to talk to that lead. These calls are dropped and those leads are wasted.

This is an alienating experience for potential customers, and is a major reason consumers complain about telemarketing and legislation is passed regulating it. Little is accomplished by a remote sales business when their leads refuse to talk with them.

Power dialers eliminate this problem entirely. This kind of dialer calls only one lead at a time for each available sales representative, ensuring that each answering lead has a sales rep ready to talk with him or her.

Some B2C companies use a predictive dialer because they do not care about customer experience ? they feel they can find enough ?easy? sales to make up for the leads they waste. This could never work in B2B sales where each lead typically takes longer to close, and the ROI is greater.

Additionally, B2B sales reps often have to navigate through ?gatekeepers,? and these secretaries will never pass a sales rep who keeps her on hold through to a decision maker. Predictive dialers just do not provide the personal attention that a power dialer can.

Power dialer software triples the amount of calls a sales lead can make in a day, but just as important is the experience the power dialer allows the lead to have. Power dialer technology will deliver not only on a higher call rate, but a higher close rate.

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