Why Your Sales Team Should Use VoIP

A lot of businesses operate through cold calling customers to sell their services. Some obvious examples of verticals that use cold calling include double glazing, the charity sector, utility companies, banking and finance. It’s a multi-million dollar industry.

If you are operating in any one of these sectors, and managing a large sales team, time really does cost you money. Small repetitive tasks, like dialing a number, take time to undertake.

Call campaigns, a feature of VoIP systems, allow the company to set up call lists and automatically dial out to the next customer when a previous call has ended. Automated dialing saves the agent time and mental churn, especially useful when there are large volumes of calls to be made.

VoIP Allows For Remote Offices & Answering

Modern communication methods are changing the way that we work and how companies operate. With a good internet connection, it’s no longer necessary to work from your office. Indeed, some companies don’t even have an office and are working remotely from multiple IP addresses.

Yet even though our working patterns might be changing, many professional expectations persist. Many customers and businesses prefer to work with a company that is based in their local area.

With VoIP, you can operate from a local number in multiple parts of the country should you choose. This is useful when you happen to be out of the office for whatever reason, or if you want your company to appear larger than it is.

VoIP also allows call forwarding across a range of devices, including mobile phones and laptops. Automatic call distribution also allows a phone to be routed to multiple devices at once. Thanks to this functionality, you can answer a call using your business number wherever you happen to be. On top of this, should you be unavailable, you can route the call to a colleague so they can answer the inquiry.

Finally, with VoIP, calls can be forwarded to email or as a message to your phone if it has SMS integration. This functionality can be a lot more useful than you might think. Research conducted by Inside Sales found that 80 percent of calls go to voicemail, and the call back rate for first-time voicemails is just 10 percent. Or to put it another way, if you leave a voicemail to a member of your sales team, there is a very high chance they’ll never respond.

Third-Party Software Integrations

The ability to track your sales metrics is important for measuring results and identifying areas of improvement. With VoIP, you can integrate your phone system with third-party software. For example, you can utilize Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.

The obvious benefit of this approach is you can develop a business, sales and marketing strategy based on data rather than assumptions. You can track and measure metrics like:

• when was the last time a lead was contacted
• any discussion notes associated with the lead
• sales history and other pertinent data
• Customer lifetime value
• Conversion rate across the company or employee

From a management point-of-view, the ability to set up a dashboard with relevant KPIs allows the manager to review the performance of employees and identify any issues or positive results. Management can also review historical data for trends on patterns in call center demand.

You Can Use VoIP For Staff Monitoring

The ability of your staff to hit their KPI’s underpins a successful business. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, staff will sometimes fail to hit their targets. There are numerous reasons for this. As a business, it’s important to be able to identify such problems quickly before they become a problem.

By integrating your VoIP system with CRM software, you can monitor staff performance. Additional functionality inherent in a VoIP platform, such as call transcription and call recording, provides managers with the ability to review sales staff. This is important for HR management, and the personal development of your staff.

The ability to listen to calls with an employee who is new or needs help can allow managers to highlight the good and bad points in a call. This is a teaching opportunity. In a recent interview, Leslie McNamara of Citi Retail Services highlighted just how important this is.

There are additional benefits to this, of course. For example, being able to review a recorded can be important when attempting to assess how a customer complaint was managed.

Cost-Efficient Scalability & Additional Functionality

At the beginning of this article, we mentioned that one of the major benefits of VoIP is scalability. Traditional telephony is based on dedicated landlines. In order to increase capacity businesses were forced to add additional landlines at a cost. This requires an investment of time and money for a company as they scale, but also if a company has to scale down for whatever reason.