Direct Dials in Sales: They’re More Valuable Than You Know

A direct dials strategy could be the key to generating hundreds of new opportunities for your business on a daily basis. While many people overlook the value of direct dials in today’s sales landscape, the reality is they’re extremely useful to improving your call-to-conversion rate. Learning how to use a direct dial number correctly could transform your entire company.

What are Direct Dials in Sales?

According to reports, the average call-to-conversion rate is only around 9%. This is one of the reasons so many salespeople feel demotivated by the concept of cold calling. While you can’t expect every conversation to turn into a sale, you can improve your chances of getting as many sales as possible on any given day. This is where direct dials come in.

Direct-dial numbers which allow you to reach the right decision-maker as quickly as possible improve your chances of connecting with your buyer and becoming more profitable.

The term “direct dial” in sales refers to the direct phone number sales professionals can use to bypass operators and receptionists and connect directly with the people they’re trying to call. Though it might sound simple, direct dial numbers save a significant amount of time, improving sales efficiency and outcomes on a massive scale.

Why do Teams Use Direct Dials?

Direct dials make you more likely to connect to the right person when making sales calls. According to studies, it takes around 80 seconds to dial using a switchboard and 20 dials per prospect to connect to someone. This can add up to around 26 minutes on dialing alone.

Direct dialing significantly saves time by taking only around 45 seconds to dial, and around 12 dials per prospect to make a connection. Less time dialing means more time pitching and selling.

Aside from making connections faster, direct dials also increase the productivity of your team. When your staff members can spend less time searching for relevant contact information, they can reach decision-makers fast, and get to work on closing a sale.

Throughout the years, research has discovered a majority of sales professionals only spend a fraction of their day in selling activities, because so much of their valuable time goes towards research, data entry, dialing, and call scheduling. While direct dials won’t eliminate all the potential time-wasters in your sales reps’ day, it can make an important start.

What are the Advantages of a Direct Dial Strategy?

As mentioned above, using a direct phone number strategy speeds up the connections between sales professionals and potential prospects. It can also massively enhance the productivity of your team, giving them more time to focus on sales operations. Additional benefits of the direct dial include:

• Improved targeting: With direct dials, you immediately target the decision-makers in an organization, so sales teams spend less time being passed from one representative to another in a company. Direct access to a decision-maker means you have a higher chance of making a sale, particularly with follow-up calls.
• Simple training: Direct dialing techniques are designed to be as straightforward as possible, to help minimize wasted time in the sales landscape. This means it’s extremely easy to onboard any new employees coming into your sales team and teach them how to use the direct dialing systems.
• More opportunities for sales: When you use direct dial numbers, you don’t guarantee a sale, but you significantly improve your chances. You’re increasing your sales funnel opportunities by making more connections, this means you have a higher chance of making additional sales each month and bypassing sales quotes.
• Saving money: Direct dials not only help companies to make more money in the sales landscape, but it can also help with saving money too. When agents waste less time on dialing, they become more efficient, which helps the business to remain budget-friendly.

Should You Use Direct Dials?

Direct-dial numbers might not be the newest concept in the sales landscape, but it’s something that still has a direct impact on your company’s chance of success. A sales rep using a direct dial is 147% more likely to reach a decision-maker, and up to 375% more efficient than counterparts using headquarter phone numbers instead.

In an industry where time really is money, direct dials only make sense.

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