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The State Of Outbound Sales
The state of outbound sales today appears to be in a bit of a tailspin.
Sales reps cost way more than they did just 3 years ago, companies are creating a complete mess by adding an incredible amount of tech to their stack (which is expensive), deliverability on email and cold calls has plummeted, and data vendors are taking your money to the bank as you continue to feed the machine.
In other words, costs are way up and production is way down.
Now, 10-15 years ago we saw the entrance of a new category called sales engagement tools (or sequencers) that were revolutionary at the time.
Automate your tasks, dial out of, and send automated emails from one place.
Worked great.
10% or higher connect rates, 40-80% open rates on emails, and 5-10% response rates were the norm.
If you can accomplish those emails and automate some of it, that’s a massive scale lever you could pull on.
Fast forward…
Today, connect rates are 3-4% on average, open rates are plummeting (couldn’t even tell you the number because we lost interest a long time ago), and response rates are <1%.
Telecom companies are getting smarter and marking your numbers as spam (driving down connects), companies like Google/Microsoft are filtering out your emails as spam (driving down your opens), and AI has only accelerated this depreciation by creating a substantially greater volume of noise in the market which (even if your email got delivered) makes buyers less likely to respond.
It seemingly destroyed the Sales Engagement (sequencer) market for a number of reasons.
1 // They’re not built for call deliverability. They give you a handful of numbers that will be marked as spam before the end of the first week. They lack auto number rotation, spam monitoring, and number remediation features.
2 // They’re not built for email. You get a handful of email addresses that you burn through even faster than your phone numbers. They lack multiple sending domains, email rotation, solid spintax, etc. The amount of gymnastics you have to do to get cold email to work these days is absurd.
3 // Automation creates commoditization. With automation comes a massive influx of garbage in the market. It over saturated the market and trained buyers to ignore you.
And yet…
Sales teams need to sell.
So what do they turn to?
It appears that the flag the market is waving is “volume, volume, volume.”
I won’t get into cold email because let’s be honest… who cares?
So, let’s talk about the phone.
Companies think to themselves, “well our connect rate just is what it is. 4% is the new reality that we have to live with.” So, they then try to solve for volume of dials.
In walks parallel dialing
The ability to call multiple people at the same time.
“Let’s call 3-7 people at the same time and talk to whoever will pickup”
That’s the solution.
And it’s becoming a popular one.
With companies like Nooks, Orum, ConnectAndSell, etc there are a plethora of options to parallel/auto/multi-line dial.
More dials equals more conversations, conversions, pipeline, etc.
Right?
Well, yes. Technically.
But at what cost?
Parallel dialing is a better alternative than 3-4% connect rates only being able to make 50 dials on a power dialer today. Talking to 1-2 people per day is costly.
“So let’s make 300 calls instead!”
But there is a dark side to this that most people don’t consider…
Parallel dialing can certainly increase the volume of dials, but it also has negative effects.
1 // Parallel dialing will absolutely force a lower connect rate. If your connect rate on power dialing is 4%, you can expect your new connect rate to be somewhere in the range of 2%.
You may say “that’s only 2 points” and you would be correct. But 2 points is equal to 50% less. Which means that half of your conversations are gone unless you make even more dials.
2 // Parallel dialing is a spammed number machine. The statistic is that if you make 8 dials from the same number within an hour it’s very likely that number gets burned. So, what do you do? Buy more numbers? Call with burned numbers and potentially hurt that connect rate even more”
3 // Parallel dialing has a pause. Yes, when you multi-line dial you will eventually talk to someone, however there is a massive difference in call deliverability (aka someone answering) and call receptivity (aka how the call is received by the prospect). When you connect with someone (delivery), a parallel dialer has to patch you through. This causes a delay from when the prospect answers and when you get heard. And when there is a pause, even a 0.5 second pause (and some of these tools are a lot more than that) you are guaranteed to have a lower conversion rate than zero delay (receptivity).
Let’s give an example from outside the parallel world.
We power dial. We do not have a pause. We use TitanX which means we have 25% connect rates (and it’s stayed there over the last 200,000 dials for our sales reps). However, there have been a handful of days where we were having wifi issues at the office or a rep was too far away from their router and it was causing a delay. On those days where that was happening, we saw a 30-40% DROP in our conversion rate on the phones. A half second delay took away 1 in 3 opportunities.
You are signing up for that on every conversation with a parallel dialer.
4 // Parallel dialing will force you to lose good conversations for unqualified ones. If you are dialing 5 people at a time all day long, it is unavoidable that you are going to disconnect with people that would have otherwise answered in favor of whoever answered sooner.
What happens when a gatekeeper, operator, or wrong person answers the phone, the parallel dialer patches you in, and disconnects with the rest of the people? You are most certainly losing what would be conversations with a possible perfect prospect in favor of someone who could never buy from you.
5 // Parallel dialing does not give you context for who is about to answer. If I’m calling 5 people at the same time there is about a 20% chance I know who is about to answer the phone. Therefore, I have a next to 0% chance of having any context for the prospect that I talk to.
What does that do for your conversions?
So add all of that up and what do you get?
You get a data eating, spam creating, conversion hindering machine.
But hope is not lost…
The Real Solution
What if you could have way more conversations with your prospects, never call a disconnected number again, have zero pause once they answer, and know who you are about to talk to?
Sounds like a dream, right?
No, not a dream.
That exists today.
TitanX creates that reality.
Build your lists the way you’ve built them, use the same dialer you currently use, and make the same or less dials than you’ve been making.
We tell you exactly who in your market you can (and will) reach via the phone, which number they have the highest propensity to answer, remove the bad data from your list, and tell you which prospects are best prospected to on other channels.
The result? 25% connect rates.
In other words, your reps talk to a prospect every 4 dials instead of every 30-50 dials.
This has a net positive impact on conversion. No pauses, you know who you are talking to before they answer, and you get “in the pocket” as a rep because you are in a groove.
So, let’s compare 3 options.
Power Dialing (status quo):
50 dials per day
4% connect rate
10% meeting rate
2 connects per day
0.2 meetings per day
= 4 meetings per month
Parallel dialing:
300 dials per day
2% connect rate,
7% meeting rate
6 connects per day
0.42 meeting per day
= 8.4 meetings per month
Improvement? Yes. Now watch this.
Power Dialing w/ TitanX:
50 dials per day
25% connect rate
12% meeting rate
12.5 connects per day
1.5 meetings per day
= 30 meetings per month
750% more meetings than power dialing without TitanX. 350% more meetings than parallel dialing.
So, the question is obvious.
What’s a meeting worth to you?
What does a sales rep blowing up their comp targets do for your rep retention?
How much do you save on hiring when your existing reps are THIS productive?
Parallel dialing is an “okay” option.
But there is a far more valuable and scalable option out there.
Schedule a call with us today to see the impact of TitanX on your sales team.
