Telemarketing Best Practices for Power Dialing

Telemarketing Best Practices for Power Dialing

The best practices for telemarketing with a power dialer create easy-to-run campaigns that award you with a much higher ROI than you’d typically get from using just a regular office phone. Implementing them habitually into your strategy also makes the entire process of calling leads and tracking call results way more simple and easier to manage, too. So, if you’re cold calling or you need an efficient way of following up with aged leads or existing clients, following these 15 best practices for telemarketing with a power dialer are for you.

Editor’s note: Power dialing is a special feature of call automation software that enables a person, typically a sales rep, to make phone calls to customers in a rapid succession, one call right after another. Essentially, you’re able to control the amount of phone rings delivered before the software automatically hangs up and begins calling the next person in your spreadsheet list. The ultimate benefit of power dialing is that it allows you to call and actually talk to more people in less time. This makes it super easy to reach your monthly quotas and exceed your monthly sales goals. It’s quite an effective way to grow and scale your business.

Before You Power Dial

(Before campaign launch)

1. Prepare to call a specific, targeted audience. Power dialing is great way to speed through a call list, but successful campaigns always start with having a great list of targeted leads to call. Otherwise, you’ll blaze through your campaign without achieving desired results. Yes, dialing faster is convenient and should be a key component of your campaign strategy. However, power dialing is meant to help you reach more live answers in less time who you can qualify — not just simply make more calls as fast as possible. So, make sure you’re not wasting your time. Grab a list of B2C or B2B leads who fall within your targeted demographics.


2. Choose a Caller ID that benefits you the most. If you’re launching B2C campaigns, i.e. calling residents, it’s reported that using a toll-free number will render a weak 7% answer rate. In strong contrast, 28% of residents are likely to answer the phone if you use a local presence Caller ID, giving telemarketers a huge advantage. In B2B campaigns, it doesn’t matter what your Caller ID displays, because it’s not in a business’s best interest to ignore a ringing phone. Businesses nearly always answer.



3. Be respectful and compliant. As every telemarketer should know, millions of US citizens have added their phone numbers to the National Do Not Call Registry to avoid receiving unsolicited calls. To obey the law and respect the privacy of consumers, telemarketers are encouraged to obtain a copy of the registry and remove these “bad” phone numbers from their call lists. Normally, this task would take hours or full days to complete, however, a DNC Scrubber cleans your lists instantly, saving you a ton of time and ensuring your lists are safe to call. That’s why Dolphin Power Dialer includes a free DNC Scrubber. It keeps you protected at no extra cost. How awesome is that?

4. Customize fields and dispositions so they are relevant to your campaign. For example, if you’re a real estate agent, your campaign could involve asking people if they have any motivation to sell their home. Therefore, you might want customized fields for holding information pertaining to “Home Market Value” or “# of Bedrooms” and “# of Bathrooms” If you qualify them, you can disposition them as “Highly Motivated,” Somewhat Motivated,” or “Not Motivated.” You get the idea.

5. Have your script(s) ready. You want to be alert and ready to speak with your prospects as soon as you hear them say “hello” so you’ll want to have your scripts open before your campaign starts. Working this way prevents you from fumbling over your words or guessing what to say next, and ultimately keeps you sounding professional.

While You Power Dial

(During a campaign)

6. Preview your lead’s information. Be ready to greet the person by name as soon as they answer and say “hello.” This shows you are professional, courteous, and makes it a lot easier to create an instant rapport that you can build on. You should also scan over any notes you previously saved.

7. Know the last call result. If you’re calling a new list with fresh leads that haven’t been worked yet, you won’t have a “last call result” as a reference point. However, if you’re calling the same leads again as a reattempt or follow-up call, knowing the last call result will benefit you tremendously. You can pick up the conversation right where you left off and be able to steer it in the direction you want to go.

8. Disposition every call. In order know last call results, you must disposition every call as “hot,” “warm,” “no answer,” etc. By applying these labels, you will always know the outcome of your previous conversation or call attempts. After your campaign, you can then use these dispositions to your advantage by creating new lists containing only the people you labeled as hot and warm leads. For more tips on how to use dispositions, see more in the section below titled “After You Power Dial.”

9. Take good notes. For inside sales teams and telemarketers, keep in mind that every prospect you speak with will have different needs and unique personalities that you must cater to — which is why you must take quality notes. Sure, dispositions are great for knowing where your leads are located in your sales funnel, but being able to save and review your notes — especially if they contain important details — will help you guide these leads even further down your sales funnel.

It could also prove auspicious to bring up a topic from the last conversation you had with the prospect, showing you cared enough about them to remember even the tiniest of details of what their needs are. Prospects are more likely to pay attention you if you pay extra attention to them.

10. Transition between power dialing and preview dialing. If you need a break during a campaign — you can stop power dialing at anytime. In lieu, with leisure you can click to get the next record in your list, then make the call when you’re ready. This gives you more time to preview lead information, too, so you’re even more prepared to make the next call.

11. Leave voicemail drops. This one’s a no-brainer. Verbally repeating voicemail messages for answering machines is very boring, tiresome, and can easily drain your morale and ambition. Plus, your time and attention should be devoted to speaking with live answers, not dozens of answering machines. With Dolphin Power Dialer, you can click to send pre-record messages (that you create yourself) and then move onto the next call without skipping a beat. Obviously, following the best practice for voicemail messages will increase your callback rate and make your overall campaign more successful.

After You Power Dial

(After a campaign)

The majority of your work is completed before and during the campaign. So what should you do next?

12. Pat yourself on the back. By power dialing and dispositioning every called lead, you finished a telemarketing campaign in record-breaking time. Congratulations!

13. Create filtered lists. Every disposition you selected during the campaign was stored as each lead’s last call result. You can now use this information to your full advantage and segment the good leads into one pile, and the not-so-good leads into other piles. This makes it super easy to keep track of all your lead statuses and also gives you the added option to call specific leads again.

For example, you can generate a list containing only the leads who didn’t answer the phone during your last attempt. If you’d like, you could label this list “Potential Leads,” “Cold leads,” or simply “No Answers.” More examples of filtered lists are shown below:

14. Separate the good leads from the bad ones. The leads you dispositioned as qualified or future interest can now be stored in Dolphin’s CRM for easy access and future retrieval when it’s time to call them again. Feel free to delete or store the “No Interest” list somewhere else on your computer — you likely won’t be needing it unless you have new or improved products and services you can sell to these types of prospects in the future.

15. Follow up by phone or email if appropriate. You knew this step was coming. Following up is an important practice you should commit to doing with nearly every prospect you come across. So, make sure to add this final step into your workflow with Dolphin Power Dialer.

When it’s time to recontact people, simply import whichever filtered list of leads you want to try calling again, such as those with whom you didn’t speak with yet, or those who expressed future interest. After each re-attempt, make sure you disposition the call again if their status has changed from a potential or cold lead to something else.

If you want to reach out to your leads again, but don’t feel a phone call is the appropriate course of action, you can instead send an email template to everyone in a matter of minutes via Dolphin’s emailer. You should also keep in mind that many people have a preferred communication channel, so it often pays to combine calling and emailing to render a response.

Fundamentally, these are the best telemarketing practices for power dialing, but everyone has their own way of doing things, so it’s encouraged you find a workflow that works best for your business. However, for most intents and purposes, by following the guided workflow above, you will find it very easy to speed through campaigns and quickly build lists of qualified leads who want to take a ride through your sales funnel. That’s the power of Dolphin Power Dialer.