[#Blogged]- 5 Ways Lightning Dialer Can Help Your Business!

Over the past decade, businesses have seen a drastic shift in how communications with customers are taking place.  Door to door visits and in-person meetings were rapidly replaced with phone calls and still continues to shift into other “remote” forms of contact.  A few years ago, the whole sub-departments of sales cropped up to fill this need, as companies realized business could be continued without the expense of travel and face to face visits. As the drive to become more flexible increased, so did a new crop of issues. Sales management began to realize how much time was spent dialling and recording notes, and how much time would need to be spent on data entry from these calls. It became noticeable how overwhelming it could be for sales representatives to spend hours entering data, and unfortunately, how that task could fall by the wayside, leaving gaps in information that could be very valuable to the company. 
Salesforce took note and released a great solution to these problems with Lightning Dialer. This is a feature of Salesforce that allows reps to make calls without leaving the system, but has a host of other features, as well. They listened to the headaches sales reps experienced and built-in many solutions to help make their job more efficient. There are features, as well, that provide great insight for Sales Management that can help analyze how business is being conducted and allow them to improve training where necessary.  At the end of the day, having a tool that not only improves data retention but also makes Sales jobs more efficient is a win! 
Here are my 5 Ways Lightning Dialer Can Help Your Business!

• Forwarding Number - One of the great things about Dialer is that it can be desktop driven with a headset, and you don’t have to worry about constant neck cramps from holding a phone to your ear all day.  However, we all know you can’t stay strapped to your desk constantly. Trips to the water cooler are a must, and caffeine is a necessary pick-me-up throughout your shift! Lightning Dialer allows you to forward calls to the main business line or cell phone so you never have to miss a call again. It’s also one of the easiest features to use and can be set up in less time than it takes to grab that cup of coffee. 

• Voicemail Drop - We’ve all been there: you read over the details of who you’re calling, nervously anticipate whether or not they will answer, and rehearse what you might say to their voicemail if they do not. Doing that over and over again throughout the day can really wear down your mind, and lead to gaffes, such as that awkward pause when you’ve forgotten someone’s name. Or worse yet, why you’re calling. Thanks to voicemail drop, you no longer have to face those stressful moments! You can pre-record voice messages to leave regarding a certain feature you’re upselling, details of a sales pitch,  or a general inquiry of specific customers. Then, with a click of your mouse, you can select that recording to take the place of you repeating yourself 20 times within the hour. Your cubicle neighbours will thank you!

• Local Presence - It is becoming more and more known that businesses and individuals will pick up the phone for numbers that identify as local, based on area or country codes. Out of state or out of area numbers are a bright red flag that you may not know who is calling, and most people like to ignore that. Speaking to a person will increase the chances of continued communications and closing a sale. The local presence feature can be a game-changer in the way your sales do business and are pretty easy to set up, as well.

• Fewer Clicks for your Reps - In general, a sales rep has the following experience: they dial the number of the contact or lead manually on their phone, have conversations which are hopefully recorded in some way, end the call, log a task in Salesforce, type up the notes that they remembered, create a reminder task for a follow-up, and navigate to a different contact on a different account and repeat the process for their next call. That sounds like a lot! And, you really hope they don’t get interrupted or have to rush off to a meeting, relying on memory to go back later in the day for their data entry. This scenario is all too real. One of the best selling features of Lightning Dialer is how much easier their job becomes when making sales calls. Features like: a single click on the phone number to place their call, a headset that allows their hands to type notes while they’re focused on the conversation, and an Auto Log checkbox that files those notes immediately to an automatically created task. Not only that, but no bouncing around Salesforce looking for contacts -- they can create a predetermined list that lines up their calls for them. Just like that, they can get through their day focused on selling, all with a lot fewer clicks.

• Tools for Managers - As a sales manager, with a large team, there’s a lot to keep up with.  Part of your responsibility is making sure your team is doing a great job, but that can be pretty difficult without ways to monitor sales calls. This is especially true when there is a group of new hires.  With Call Monitoring, you can now listen in to live conversations your reps are having, and provide valuable coaching afterwards to help them improve.  This isn’t the only feature for managers - there are also custom reports that give more insight to usage metrics as well, to better understand user adoption and hold sales reps accountable for using Lightning Dialer. 

Lightning Dialer offers an outbound calling product with the option to add inbound calling functionality. You can pay for just the total number of minutes your entire org uses (in blocks of 1,000 minutes).
Lightning Dialer Pricing
Wanna see more? Be sure to check out this video demo for a quick peek into Lightning Dialer capabilities, and learn more in the Lightning Dialer module on Trailhead.