An up and coming technology that I have been getting more familiar with over the last few weeks is a dialer integration for the Salesforce CRM platform. As the Salesforce system becomes more of a lead management platform than a CRM, it has given other companies an opportunity to integrate their products into Salesforce. Software companies within the lead management space as well as related spaces such as email and dialer management consoles have taken advantage of this opportunity as it allows them access to more potential customers without having so much competition. Among the many software integrations, the one that I’ve noticed has had, by far, the most demand is dialers. With the this makes sense with the current tendency to move away from outside sales and its inherent burdens on sales and marketing budgets.
The are many kinds of dialer Apps for Salesforce. These can vary between click to calls on lead and contact pages all the way to a complete power dialer. The click to calls give you the ability to call leads immediately from phone number on the lead form itself. The downside is that the process of calling a group of leads is not very streamlined. The power dialers many times do not have a click to call integration, but they do allow you to call your leads quickly much like you can from a complete dialer software. The beauty of all of this is that with these kinds of Apps with the Salesforce system allow you to use Salesforce much like you would use a stand alone Lead Response Management software suite. Salesforce had much of what is built in to LRM software, but there are a few important tools that are missing in the Salesforce arsenal. In my opinion, the immediate response tools, and especially a a dialer solution among these, are the biggest missing factor. The Appexchange solves all of this though, making Salesforce even more powerful and effective in lead management and contact management in general.
One of the best integrations I have seen is by InsideSales.com They do not offer a predictive dialer software but instead offer a power dialer which allows for calling leads quickly and has a full integration of their dialer into the SalesForce CRM. They also have a ResponsePop tool that allow for immediate web to lead to telephone call with 5 minutes or less, which I think is fantastic.
Tags: Lead, Management, Marketing, Lead response Management, Sales, Marketing Software, Insidesales, Salesforce, Lead Management, Lead Nurturing, Dialer, demand generation, lead generation
