Two Must-Have Technological Advancements For Power Users

Sales agents, like the rest of us, are always looking for the next innovation that can help them in their daily tasks. Salesforce CTI is one such example of innovations in technology for the sales realm.  Whether it’s making more connections, making better connections, or turning those connections into closed deals, agents are always on the hunt for their next edge. Traditionally, technology has lagged behind, and been a source of frustration rather than empowerment. In the beginning, a pain point for a sales team was only being able to make a single call at a time. Later, it was not being able to tell who was calling into your Cisco phone line. There are still numerous issues that plague the everyday salesperson, but tech firms are working to solve them.

Manually dialing numbers

Enterprise level sales agents make 100 calls per day, on average, through various Cisco CTI devices. When we factor in that these calls are dialed manually through a Cisco desk phone, a pain point immediately jumps out. It takes anywhere from 10-15 seconds to look up a prospects number and manually dial it; and while that might not sound like a huge source of frustration, when extrapolated over the course of a day, week, month or even year, it becomes clear that salespeople shouldn’t have to lose time to this antiquated process. Conservatively, if each manually dialed call takes 10 seconds, that translates to 16 minutes lost per day, 83 minutes per week, 333 minutes per month, and 4,000 minutes per year. That last figure comes out to 66 hours per year that are wasted simply clicking buttons on a Cisco device, and that’s just per rep. If you have a sales team of 10, that’s 660 hours a year that could have been spent trying to close more deals or make new connections.

“Clerical work”

Every single call that an agent takes or receives needs to be recorded in Salesforce CRM. Aside from having detailed notes regarding the call, management needs to know how many calls are being placed and logged to Salesforce, how many notes were taken, and the specifics behind each conversation; which makes it vital for agents of any kind to be able to quickly and efficiently log all call data. Salesforce CTI is intuitive in that it alleviates part of the problem but this is still a daunting task, as an individual agent can make hundreds of calls per week, and having to manually enter information into Salesforce takes a significant amount of time. From our research, we’ve found that on average, a salesperson spends 90 seconds after a call manually entering relevant data and notes into Salesforce. If a rep makes 100 calls a day, that’s 150 minutes of their day wasted.

So, how are tech firms solving these two major pain points?

Click-to-Dial

A click to dial integration is a technology that uses advanced logic to determine if a string of numbers is actually a phone number, and then leverages HTML-rich environments to generate a hyperlink.  That hyperlink can be clicked which routes directly to a configured device for the user, eliminating the need to manually dial a number. A popular integration does so by monitoring extension data and allowing users to configure their extensions through a “dashboard.”  This allows for a seamless integration to your Cisco desk phone or softphone of choice.

How does it work?

By monitoring and assigning a Cisco extension to a sales agent through a configurable “dashboard”, the integration is able to then send a request to the Cisco phone system which will then grant the request and send it to the device of the agent’s choosing. This is what the tech looks like on a typical webpage.

As shown above, the integration is able to recognize when a string of numbers is actually a phone number, convert it to a hyperlink, which is then used as a request to the Cisco phone system.  

Call logging and notation with a Cisco/Salesforce integration

Now that we’ve solved the issue of manually dialing phone numbers, we can address the second pain point; manually logging calls to a CRM. There’s now technology that will automatically log every outbound and inbound call to your connected CRM. This type of integration has an all-inclusive suite of functionality that will provide on-demand CRM information, allow users to edit their leads in real time, and update dispositions while on the call. No longer do reps need to wait until after the call is completed to log all of their various activities, they can simply do it as it happens. Having this capability literally at your fingertips dramatically increases call potential, as reps are no longer hindered by needing to dedicate time after their call to manually enter information.

How does it work?

A popular integration that leverages this functionality does so by bridging the user’s Cisco phone system and Salesforce CRM data. This is accomplished by integrating the systems through the admin level and allowing both sides to talk to each other. This creates an API user with Salesforce that then has access to write on behalf of the integration. It then leverages each user’s Salesforce ID to create records on behalf of that user. For example, if a Salesforce user creates a task, that task is created by the API user and assigned to the user of the integration. This integration then uses the API user level credentials with read/write level access to quickly parse Salesforce data and have it available for you in a Chrome Extension. This gives you better visibility over the call you are making and the customer you are reaching out to.  If the lead already exists, it will pull that lead data through the phone number you recently called and allow you to quickly edit that record through a Floating UI.

Why is this significant?

Gone are the days of manually editing records and trudging through hundreds of calls. Users are now instantly able to edit their records while on call, creating a more natural call flow, greatly increasing the number of outbound calls made per day, and provides reps with greater visibility to the lead data they need to reference.

This article is originally published at Tenfold.