3 Hot Trends For Inside Sales Teams Using Salesforce.com

One of the great things about industry conferences is the ability to interact with industry leaders, customers and prospects, and benefit from their insight firsthand. This is especially valuable during a time when sales and marketing departments are  undergoing such a technological and strategic transformation.

Last month, the Dreamforce conference provided this dialogue in spades. Based on my observations, here are three things that we’ll hear much more about in the near future.

Click-to-Call Cited as the Biggest Time Saver

Awareness of the TCPA’s impact on auto-dialers was higher than I had expected. As we promoted the free trial of our Chrome browser softphone for Salesforce, several people took the time to ask whether it was a robo-dialer (it’s not, and it’s fully FCC-compliant). And with this, a number of inside sales managers I spoke to emphasized the importance of click to call in Salesforce. The ability to click on any lead in Salesforce and directly dial is paramount. With many inside sales managers encouraging their reps to make between 50-100 calls per day, there’s simply no time to waste on misdialing.

Contextual Sales Data is Growing in Importance

I think we’re going to hear a lot about not only the types of data sales reps need to make their conversations more intelligent, but also the design of the interface in which that data arrives. Easy access to past sales communications will be especially valuable to both customers and sales reps, in order to power more successful sales calls and better customer experiences. For reps, access to contextually relevant sales talking points and specific social data will also continue to be valuable.

Be Strategic About When You Call Prospects

At a stellar panel session on Inside Sales strategies, Matt Bertuzzi mentioned the importance of timing. “At 10:30, there is nobody worth talking to at their desk,” he said. Obviously, this all depends on who your customers are, what their behavioral patterns are, and even what time zone you’re in. But it’s worth repeating that sales reps need to make the most of prime call windows. Outside of those windows, they should be focusing on email follow-up and other things, like data integrity and research. Of course, this means that sales managers need to analyze call metrics to ensure their teams are actually making calls when they should be.